Biography
| EDUCATION | ||
| 2003-2005 | MA Painting | Royal College of Art, London |
| 1996-1999 | BA (Hons) Fine Art | University of East London, London |
| ONE PERSON EXHIBITIONS | ||
| 2016 | Fistful of blood and feathers | PEER gallery, London |
| 2013 | Three new series of drawings | Rachmaninoff’s Smith/Arnatt, London |
| 2009 | I don’t believe that anybody feels the way I do about you now | Rachmaninoff’s, London |
| 2008 | Believe in me as I believe in you | Arquebuse, Geneva |
| 2007 | All that’s sacred comes from youth | Rachmaninoff’s, London |
| 2006 | To forgotten faces and faded loves | Rachmaninoff’s, London |
| SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS | ||
| 2019 | 10 Years | CHARLIE SMITH LONDON, London |
| 2018 | Transcript (curated by Zavier Ellis) | CHARLIE SMITH LONDON, London |
| 2018 | Context: Gallery Artists & Collaborators | CHARLIE SMITH LONDON, London |
| 2017 | Part II: The Turning World (curated by Zavier Ellis) | CHARLIE SMITH LONDON, London |
| 2011 | In Arcadia | IMT, London |
| 2011 | Manchester Contemporary | Old Granada Studios, Manchester |
| 2009 | This was now | Sartorial Contemporary Art, London |
| 2009 | Frieze Art Fair | Rachmaninoff’s, London |
| 2008 | New British Landscapes | takecourage, London |
| 2008 | Faith | Gallery Primo Alonso, London |
| 2008 | Tipping Point | Purdy Hicks, London |
| 2007 | Hope & Despair | Cell Project Space, London |
| 2007 | Salon Nouveau | engholm engelhorn galerie, Vienna |
| 2006 | For Peel | No More Grey Gallery, London |
| 2006 | Silent but violent | The Empire, London |
| 2006 | Into the Light of Things | Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham |
| 2006 | Jerusalem | Dean Clough Gallery, Halifax |
| AWARDS & RESIDENCIES | ||
| 2015 | Jessica Wilkes ACME Studio Award | |
| 2012 | Grants for the Arts, Arts Council England | |
| 2008 | British Council Award | |
| 2005 | Neville Burston Prize | |
| 2005 | The Worshipful Guild of Painter-Stainers Award | |
| BIBLIOGRAPHY | ||
| 2016 | Fistful of blood and feathers, by Barry Thompson | PEER gallery, London |
| 2008 | New British Landscapes, by Jalili Sami | takecourage, London |
| 2008 | Tipping Point, by Michael Stubbs | turps banana, London |
| 2007 | Hope and Despair, by Helen Sumpter | Time out London |
| 2007 | Barry Thompson, by Tony Pearson | Time out London |
| 2006 | Feature | Kultureflash |
| 2006 | Into the Light of Things, by Helen Jones | Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham |
Press Release | 10 Years | 2019
| 10 Years |
| Dale Adcock, Emma Bennett, Kiera Bennett, Sara Berman, Jelena Bulajić, Tom Butler, Paul Chiappe, Adam Dix, Susannah Douglas, Tessa Farmer, Tom Gallant, Florian Heinke, Sam Jackson, Simon Keenleyside, Thomas Langley, Wendy Mayer, Hugh Mendes, Sean Molloy, Alex Gene Morrison, Tamsin Morse, Gavin Nolan, Dominic Shepherd, Carolein Smit, Barry Thompson, Gavin Tremlett |
| PRIVATE VIEW: Thursday 11 July 6.30-8.30pm |
| EXHIBITION DATES: Friday 12 July – Saturday 10 August 2019 |
| GALLERY HOURS: Wednesday-Saturday 11am-6pm or by appointment |
| CHARLIE SMITH LONDON is delighted to announce ’10 Years’, our anniversary exhibition produced to celebrate a full decade’s operations in Shoreditch. During this time we have presented 88 exhibitions within the gallery, defining CHARLIE SMITH LONDON and gallery director Zavier Ellis’ unique curatorial vision. The gallery has also established itself as a discovery zone by being the first to exhibit many acclaimed young artists via its annual graduate exhibition Young Gods. Beyond the gallery walls, the gallery has participated in over 30 art fairs in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, UK and USA. Zavier Ellis also launched the monumental annual exhibition THE FUTURE CAN WAIT with Simon Rumley, a ten-year project that was presented in partnership with Saatchi’s New Sensations for four years and culminated in helping organise the seminal fund-raising exhibition In Memoriam Francesca Lowe. Ellis has also curated or co-curated gallery, museum and pop up exhibitions in Berlin, Frankfurt, Helsinki, Klaipėda, London, Los Angeles, Naples and Rome. And, perhaps most notably, the gallery has placed millions of pounds worth of artwork into collections globally, working with many of the most prominent international collectors, and enabling artists to continue to do what artists do best: making work. This exhibition consists of some (but by no means all) of Ellis’ favourite artists who have shown over the years at CHARLIE SMITH LONDON; some whom he has been tracking and wanting to show; and gallery artists. We hope you can join us on July 11th to help us celebrate 10 Years! Please contact gallery for images and further information. |
Press Release | Transcript | 2018
| TRANSCRIPT |
| EXHIBITION DATES Friday 25 May – Saturday 23 June 2018 |
| CHARLIE SMITH LONDON is delighted to present ‘Transcript’, a group exhibition curated by gallery director Zavier Ellis and artist Hugh Mendes. Both Ellis and Mendes have an enduring interest in text based work and in the occurrence of text itself in our general cultural environment. This exhibition will explore the use of text in contemporary art that has been transcribed from every day or alternative sources. For over a century, ushered in by Pablo Picasso’s inclusion of the fragmented word ‘JOU’ and collaged oil cloth in ‘Still-Life with Chair Caning’ (1912), artists have turned to low sources and materials gleaned from everyday life, thereby navigating visual communication away from its traditional reliance on imagery. Found elements derived from life in the studio, street and café were deployed to confront the audience directly with the stuff of reality at a time of great political, social and cultural flux. Fast paced change was axiomatic of the modern period, echoed by incessant industrial, technical and mechanical progress. Additionally, during a period of economic depression during and between the two world wars, adopting the use of accessible collage elements and found objects represented a democratisation of materials in themselves. Picasso’s introduction of text as a prominent surface component prepared the way for contemporary artists to develop it into a subject in itself, and to engage directly with popular culture; commercial strategies; and semantics. The artists in this exhibition wholeheartedly embrace the dissolution of hierarchical materials and sources. ‘Transcript’ will include painting, work on paper, video, installation, sculpture, performance and assemblage derived from film, signage, posters, advertising, newspapers, notebooks, diaries, clichés, graffiti, tattoo and schizophrenic acoustic hallucinations. Beyond this framework, ‘Transcript’ will investigate the disruption of language. In 1916 ‘Course in General Linguistics’ by Ferdinand de Saussure was posthumously published, and became a critical work in the field of semiotics. Central to Saussure’s theory is the arbitrary relationship between the signifier and signified. Taking the written word as the ultimate signifier, where meaning is attached by general consensus, text based work has the facility to communicate universally, at least to an audience who speak and read the same language. However, again from synthetic cubism onwards, text based work is often characterized by fragmentation and incoherence, where the association between signifier and signified is disrupted. This exhibition will assert that broken, covered, erased, reversed, redacted, or dissolving words, letters or sentences serve to deconstruct language in order to encourage ambiguous, new or unintentional meanings, both cognitively and instinctively. The exhibition will include a performance by Tim Etchells at the private view and on the final day: Tim Etchells 'Some Imperatives', 2011 Performance (performed by Andrew Stevenson) Thursday 24 May at 6.30pm | Saturday 23 June at 3.00pm |
Press Release | Part II: The Turning World | 2018
| Part II: The Turning World | Curated by Zavier Ellis |
| Exhibition Dates: Friday 31 March – Saturday 6 May 2017 |
| Peter Ashton Jones, Sam Douglas, Barry Thompson |
| CHARLIE SMITH LONDON presents the second in a trilogy of interconnected exhibitions. ‘The Turning World’ investigates the relevance of contemporary landscape painting in relation to the art historical, and our perception of it. Man’s relationship with the land is dependent on geographical location and historical context. Circa 10,000 BC Homo sapiens transitioned from roaming bands of hunter gatherers to farming communities that settled in order to cultivate wheat. It is at this point that man began to fundamentally manipulate the landscape, and become reliant on a singular, fixed area. He learned to control the land, and the land came to control him. In the Western art historical tradition, landscape painting evolved from being a background within which to set figures, into a subject in itself in the 16th century, specifically by artists such as Albrecht Altdorfer of the Danube School. By the 19th century landscape painting had become the dominant European genre, being significantly availed by the occurrence of Romanticism. Depictions of nature became the vehicle by which Romantic painters could express notions of awe, individuality, emotion, and the sublime. It is in this context that we ask, what is a landscape? Peter Ashton Jones approaches landscape formally, consciously relating to the idealised paintings of Titian, Bruegel and Corot. Beginning by making small pencil drawings en plein air where he grew up in the Sussex Downs, Ashton Jones renders his studio paintings by using the preparatory drawings for reference in combination with memory and experience of place. This allows for inevitable slippages between reality and the idea, thereby allowing for a fictionalisation of the landscape. Ashton Jones’ choice of subject is based on three principles: the dynamic of the composition; material possibilities; and the title, which will often reference the process of painting, such as ‘The Passage’ or ‘The Edge’. Combined with his emphasis on the technical aspects of the materiality of oil paint, surface, glazing and brushwork, Ashton Jones objectifies the landscape and his experience of it, whilst simultaneously deploying landscape to objectify the process of painting. Sam Douglas engages with the geological aspect of landscape and the structures found within it. His paintings depict the relationship between nature and man’s actions upon it. Douglas accentuates the importance of being in the landscape by travelling and undertaking residencies, so that he can continuously add more primary source material to his practice. Just as the landscape reveals its history to those who can decode its physical aspects, Douglas’ paintings are built layer upon layer over time, thus implying a set of hidden narratives formed by experiencing different landscapes at different times. Douglas sets two parameters against each other: that of English pastoral painting and manmade industrial installations and infrastructure. Growing up in Somerset near the Hinkley Point nuclear power station, this apparently contrasting aspect of landscape is embedded within the artist’s visual memory. With this in mind, Douglas’ use of colour differentiates him from other landscape painters. Hinting at the psychedelic, his subtle use of intensified pastels and disrupted surfaces allude quietly to the consequences of industrialisation. Barry Thompson makes impeccably rendered small scale landscapes in oil on panel where fact and fiction blur. Using photographs of locations in and around Dagenham, Essex, where he grew up, Thompson consciously manipulates colour, form and space to (re)create a lost or idealised past: “The work put simply focuses on the past times of one’s childhood and adolescence. By this I mean the landscape of these times both literally and psychologically. The place itself, what took place there, bird watching, playing soldiers, underage smoking, porn mags, dens, drugs, fields, trees, long grass, summer hide outs, late evenings, early mornings, the dawn chorus, music, being in a band, a whole litany of events and memories that are now traced through the act of painting and drawing.” Referencing significant personal moments, therefore, Thompson loads an aura of nostalgic longing into his paintings. There is also a suggestion of the revelatory, as the artist toys with visual tropes that have been employed by landscape painters throughout the centuries. In combination, these three painters (only one of whom is predominantly a landscape painter) all draw on their personal experience of specific places to investigate the fictional nature of landscape. They ask us to question prima facie acceptance of contemporary and historical landscape imagery, and encourage us to consider misremembering, idealisation, reality and artifice. And by extension, we are urged to consider what is natural, and what is man-made, and what is, in fact, a landscape. |