PREVIOUS EXHIBITIONS

MARCUS COPE
Got Reason
26th JANUARY - 4th MARCH 2023

ARNOLD J KEMP
Sounds
13th OCTOBER - 12th NOVEMBER 2022

ZOE BARCZA
ODRADEK, Mircoplastic Geologic Time Park
1st SEPTEMBER - 1st OCTOBER 2022

TIM NOBLE
Imaginary Beings
9th JUNE- 16th JULY 2022

SIMON LINKE
24th MARCH - 28th MAY 2022

Simon Linke

24th March – 15th May 2022

“For more than 25 years the New York based monthly magazine Art Forum has been the bible of the art world in America and Europe but strangely it has recently become the inspiration for one of the odder success stories in contemporary art. Five years ago the young British painter Simon Linke started making oil paintings that were exact replicas of the advertisement pages in Art Forum they were an immediate success Linke was taken on by a top London gallery and his paintings began to take their place on the walls of collectors on both sides of the Atlantic since then his work has been nothing if not consistent the size has varied but the subject matter hasn’t.”
 
Tracy MacLoed, speaking on TV in 1990, in her introduction to Matthew Collings interviewing Simon Linke. The Late Show, BBC 2. (Transcribed from You Tube).
 
Darren Flook presents Simon Linke’s first solo show in London for ten years and 35 years since he first showed his now famous paintings of Art Forum magazine adverts in New York and London. The two exhibitions by the young Linke (he was 28) at Lisson Gallery, London and Tony Shafrazi, New York in 1987 came with a catalogue essay by Jeffery Deitch and would launch Linke internationally as a conceptual painter and forerunner of a generation of younger British artists called the YBAs. The exhibition at Darren Flook brings together work from 1985 and works from 2021 – all of the same subject – adverts in Artforum.
 
Simon Linke (born 1958 Australia, lives and works in London) has been meticulously painting the same subject for over 35 years and the exhibition at Darren Flook’s gallery in Fitrovia, London provokes the viewer to ask “why?’ What is it about the advertisements in an American art magazine which are taken out by commercial galleries to advertise their exhibitions that has continuously fascinated the London based Linke?

The exhibition also asks the viewer to question what has changed in the last 35 years. The paintings, although of the same subject, and in the same format (square, like the magazine itself), are very different. The paintings from the 1980s are almost clinical in their exactitude of appropriation, whilst the current paintings drip and explode with texture whilst remaining faithful to their source material, a technical balancing act that can take months to complete. The other aspect that has changed is the magazine and with it the advertising, galleries and the power structures of the art world that the original paintings highlighted.

In 1987, print advertising was how information was distributed and how money, and with it an idea of power, was displayed. Today Artforum is one of many art magazines and print is only one of many possible formats and much like oil painting itself, it’s only one option, but it’s Linke’s exclusion of all but the print adverts from one magazine that highlights the changes and focuses our attention. Simon Linke’s dedication and constancy has elevated the paintings to an iconic status removed from the original context of both the magazine, the galleries that paid for the adverts and the artists names listed.  After 35 years of appropriation from a single source Linke’s paintings now stand apart from their initial inspiration.
 
Through repetition, over such a long period of time, the image of the advertisement as information has been transformed into a vehicle of expressive content whose meaning remains ambiguous, suspended as it is between the certitude of facts and the mysteries of painting.
 
For a younger generation, Linke’s paintings are to art’s relationship to power, what Richard Prince’s cowboys are to an age group who never saw a tobacco billboard. Art has both frozen the original and moved beyond it.
 

INDIA NIELSEN
M is for Madonna, M is for Mariah, M is for Mother
12th OCTOBER - 20th NOVEMBER 2021

TOBIAS SPICHTIG
NOTHING
4th JUNE-17th JULY

"Freehouse presents an exhibition of new works by Tobias Spichtig. Mainly paintings." – press release

CHARLES HARLAN
FOUNTAIN
18th MARCH–15th MAY

“As people organised themselves into larger and larger settlements, simply walking down to the river for refreshment became less practical. Fountains were a way to bring water into communities as cities developed. Some of history's first public works, they were a place for people to gather as they hydrated and cleaned, serving a similar function to the riverside of old. Over time the ruling class realised these social centres were a powerful means to propagandise users in celebration of the gods or achievements of the state, and they became more artful and technologically elaborate. 
 
More and more complicated grew the ark, and now the water is piped directly into our homes, and our rulers have begun trading futures of this essential element on the stock exchange as a commodity while droughts worsen. 
 
During our time of pandemic, the fountain is a symbol of our social lives – something that has become so rare in our dense cities. We long for our collective gathering places and what connects us, even as those very things threaten to spread the virus.” – Charles Harlan 

Charles Harlan was born in 1984 in Georgia, and is currently based in Wilmington, North Carolina. As a sculptor, Harlan explores found and industrial materials – from stones, bricks and wire fencing – in a practice informed by his surrounding environment. Harlan has described his aim as conveying “art experiences with non-art objects”. For him, these sculptures are artefacts, moving across the history of manual labour and craftsmanship, his own personal narratives, and wider human nature and storytelling. Water, or the suggested presence of water, including the themes of bathing, baptisms and fishing, has occurred before in Harlan’s work.
 
At Freehouse, this presence takes its most integral role to date; the large-scale, singular, solitary fountain here is fully functioning, and constructed from found materials. As with his other work, Harlan here transforms these mundane objects into a symbolic form. They are artefacts in a material sense, but they are also something more, living out the tension between these two states, use value and symbolic value, shaped by the passage of time.
 
Harlan has exhibited internationally, with solo shows at galleries that include JTT, New York, Atlanta Contemporary, Karma, New York, Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Los Angeles, Carl Kostyál, London, and Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels. He has featured in numerous group exhibitions, including at David Zwirner, New York, Massimo de Carlo, London, and M Woods, Beijing. “Fountain” is Harlan’s first solo show with Freehouse.

Text originally published in Project Credit

Words by Christabel Stewart; all photographs by Damian Griffiths

Milly Thompson has professed an admiration for the work of American feminist artist Martha Rosler. In a significant engagement with the latter’s work, Thompson has exhibited, published the script of and linked through her website to Martha Rosler Reads Vogue. In this live performance from 1981 for public-access cable television, Rosler deconstructs the messages and advertisements found in the magazine and investigates how socioeconomic realities and political ideologies dominate ordinary life. It’s an exceptional and prescient work from the artist known for constructing incisive social and political analyses of the myths and realities of contemporary culture. Thompson included it as part of “Evasion” (2012), an exhibition with contributions from Alison Jones, Josephine Meckseper and Nicole Wermers, as well as Thompson and Rosler. The script for Rosler's video was included in the accompanying journal VUOTO, a publication mirroring the luxury magazine, being both a collection of critical artworks and high-end self-objectification. With an editor’s letter by Nina Power, it considers the fields of fashion-art and media, “where opposition nestles in co-dependency”.

A choice quote from Rosler’s piece: “Vogue is: voyeurism, mystification, the skin of luxury. The whiff of decadence, the allure of narcissism. The old you don’t want to be anymore becoming the new you that you want to be. The weak face covered over by the strong face. It is submission. The hunt, drama, animalism. It is the triumph of and the power of the phallus to transform. It is self as object as sculpture as creation. It is submissiveness in the guise of which power over men, over women, over career, over private worlds. What is Vogue? It is luxury, allure, mystery, romance, excitement, love, splendour. It is fashion, it is clothes, diet, exercise, accessories, it is loving and losing, loving and winning, it is career, it is travel, it is knowing how and knowing who and knowing when.”

For her current, albeit lockdown-interrupted, solo exhibition – simply titled “Four New Paintings” – at Freehouse, London, Thompson is presenting, among others, a new painting entitled Deep Voguing. The complex composition of this large-scale work depicts a female body rendered in shades of black and electric blue, on a patterned, abstracted background. The figure is almost contorted into the space of the landscape canvas. She is adorned with several accessories: a neck chain, bracelet and ring, each quite chunky and echoing the complex manipulations of the body. Voguing itself is a style of dance that arose in African American and Latino gay and trans cultures in America from the early 1960s to the 1980s: demonstrations that specifically performed aspects of identity such as race, gender and sexuality, showing them as fluid and intersecting. The drag competitions (most notably documented in Paris Is Burning from 1990) that began during this time eventually shifted from elaborate pageantry to vogue dance battles. Inspired by the poses of models from Vogue magazine, voguing is characterised by striking a series of positions as if one is modelling for a shoot. Arm and leg movements are angular, linear, rigid, and move swiftly from one static position to another. The practice continues today in a “New Way” that combines these rigid movements with limb contortions at the joints and hand and wrist illusions. It can also be described as a modified form of mime in which imaginary geometric shapes, such as a box, are introduced during motion and move progressively around the dancer's body to display their dexterity and memory, therefore involving incredible flexibility. Thompson’s figure, itself painted into an eccentric and pointedly awkward pose, can be looked at through this lens.

The artist’s “4 New Paintings” continues – or perhaps expands – on a text she wrote in 2010, “I Choose Painting”, in which she cautions us to look beyond rhetoric to what is still at stake: “a woman artist’s right to decide the manner and means of her own representation”. A potent moment in a world embroiled in complex, fractured and damaging identity politics. Thompson has not shied away from the post-menopausal female nude, nor the exploration of women’s politics of work and leisure. The accompanying three works, and especially Temple Creation, also celebrate form, colour, the repeated motif of the curved form of a gourd, and quotidian still life in a manner that elevates but does not obfuscate that same ordinary life that Rosler alludes to when examining why we should be so taken in by the surface of an alluring, luxurious sexuality.

First published in Project Credit

SHAAN SYED

Thank you India, Goodbye Pakistan, Hello England

EXHIBITION
4th July - 15th August 2020

The exhibition “Thank you India, Goodbye Pakistan, Hello England” contains only three paintings; large scale, two colour, graphic and copper framed, each referencing the Great Mosque of Samarra in Iraq. It is Shaan Syed’s first exhibition at Freehouse, London.

 

Syed was born in 1975, in Toronto, Canada and lives and works in London, UK. The title of the exhibition refers to his father’s migration path during and after the Partition of India (1947), and nods towards Shaan’s own journey since his father’s death of examining what it means to be brought up in a mixed household, to pray in a language you don’t understand, to look different to what you are, to be gay and to be an engaged human, making abstract paintings in London in 2020.

 

In conversations on the phone and in the artist’s east London studio we cover topics from Christopher Wool’s “The Harder You Look The Harder You Look”, the influence of Mary Heilmann and the Moroccan painter Mohamed Melehi, Blinky Palermo, to the representation of Muslims in the films of his childhood and Indian tantra paintings. Three paintings, two colours each, simple at first glance, but incredibly complex meditations of division and unity, of history, both personal, religious, geographic, cultural, sexual and intellectual. It’s with this complexity in mind that I have decided to reproduce, in full, a statement by Syed on the next page regarding these three paintings. For myself I see Wool and Palermo, but also road signs, advertisements, the monoliths of Kubrick’s 2001, Peter Halley, and a mixed heritage, grand abstract take on Ed Ruscha’s stripped down vision of the American pop landscape.

 

Selected Recent Solo Exhibitions Maghrib, Parisian Laundry, Montreal. 2019. I & I, Kunsthalle Winterthur, Winterthur and Licking Forward Tangerine, noshowspace, London both 2015. CAPITAL!, Galerie Michael Janssen, Berlin and One Minus One, Ana Cristea Gallery, New York both 2014. Wishful Thinking, Vous Etes Ici, Amsterdam and Shaan Tariq Hassan-Syed, Birch Libralato, Toronto both 2013. Hole, Vous Etes Ici, Amsterdam 2011

 

Two Person Exhibitions Shaan Syed and Sam Windett, Patrick De Brock Gallery, Knokke; Manuel Graff and Shaan Syed, Herrmann Germann Contemporary, Zurich both 2016
Selected Recent Group Exhibitions A Tapered Teardrop, Terrace Gallery, London and The Inhuman/Difficult Transition, Thames-Side Studios, London both 2019. The Other Side, The PowerPlant, Toronto 2018.

 

Destroyed by Shadows, Cornerstone Gallery, Liverpool Hope University, Liverpool and Here; Locating Contemporary Canadian Artists, Aga Khan Museum, Toronto both 2017. John Moores Painting Prize, Walker Art Gallery/Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool 2016. The Violet Crab, David Roberts Art Foundation (DRAF), London 2015

 

Shaan Syed

 

Artists Text

 

FREEHOUSE

If painting and seeing is a process that involves an exchange of differences, then there are certain questions that I feel are urgent which relate to how looking can be political and the role a painting can play in the exchange of seeing. The problems and experiences of being raised in a bi-racial, new immigrant family, by a Protestant British mother and a Muslim Pakistani father, in Canada, during the 1970s, 80s and 90s, has given me a particular insight into how the act of seeing is constantly in flux, and dependent on context.

 

Recently I have been painting a repeated motif of a step. It originates from a picture of the giant spiral staircase that forms the minaret of the Great Mosque of Samarra in Iraq. Also known as the “twisted minaret” or “snail shell”, it is the only surviving in-tact part of the mosque, originally built in the 9th century CE. The staircase that spirals up and around its' exterior allowed the muazzin (the official of the mosque who summons the faithful to prayer) to reach its zenith, where he would have performed and projected the five-times-a-day call to prayers. In it's flattened state as an image (I have only seen it as a picture), the spiral structure of the minaret is an asymmetrical ascending and layered tapered cone that bisects sky and land, and to my eyes, appears to contradict islamic culture's avoidance of the iconic.

 

The use of the step initially came about from a desire to divide the canvas. By dividing, I set up a problem of configuring two sides back together. I was drawn to the minaret because it is a cultural signifier; a nod to my own personal upbringing, and one that I am using to explore the shifting nature of seeing. Flattening the minaret's form on the picture plane and using the resulting diagonal divisions is a way to create a space formed by a process of negotiation and reciprocity. The process requires a system of back and forth, whereby one side of the painting is painted, and the other side is painted in response, and then the previous side inevitably must change and so on, until surfaces become layered and built up, eventually arriving at a place where both sides are oppositional, yet co-exist through some sort of cohesion and/or tension. The process echoes a call and response, returning to the intrinsic purpose of a minaret, and speaks to me about the act of painting, the act of looking, and the work involved in both.

 

GABRIELE BEVERIDGE
Softened Future Life

GENERAL MEETING
Co-curated with Nancy Hatcher

Kobby Adi

Mandy El-Sayegh

Dustin Ericksen

Heike-Karin Föll

Eva Gold

Robin Graubard

Xavier Robles de Medina

EXHIBITION: 16th NOVEMBER - 21st DECEMBER 2019

BETTY TOMPKINS
Talking, Talking, Talking

EXHIBITION: 30th SEPTEMBER - 9th NOVEMBER 2019

MILLY THOMPSON

EXHIBITION: 9th MARCH - 14th APRIL 2019

LUCAS DILLION
Earthtone 

EXHIBITION: 4th MAY - 23rd JUNE 2019

SEAN LANDERS
Studio Films 90/95

EXHIBITION: 12th JANUARY - 17th FEBRUARY 2019

TOBIAS SPICHTIG

Das Böse im Dunkeln

EXHIBITION: 30th SEPTEMBER - 11th NOVEMBER 2018

CLAIRE FONTAINE
Untitled (Open) 2012

Permanent installation in the window of FREEHOUSE