Expander
16 - 24 October 2004
Royal Academy of Arts
6 Burlington Gardens, London W1
tel: 020 8533 9645
www.expander.org.uk
Press view 12 – 3 pm 15th October - Free Entry
Haluk Akakce, Cory Arcangel, Manfredi Beninati, Iris van Dongen, Dee Ferris, Vladimir Dubossarsky & Alexsander Vinogradov, Jaime Gili, Barnaby Hosking, Pearl C. Hsuing, Muhammad Imran Qureshi, Christopher Landoni, Alisa Margolis, Jason Meadows, Alison Moffett, Rosalind Nashashibi, Christopher Orr, Neal Rock, Mark Titchner, Christian Ward, Richard Wathen, Toby Ziegler
EXPANDER is an exhibition of new art at the Royal Academy of Art curated by Mustafa Hulusi. The exhibition, to coincide with the Frieze Art Fair, will showcase the work of a new generation of London-based and international artists, who are opening up original perspectives on painting, sculpture and video.
The Frieze Art Fair in 2003 confirmed London’s status as a major centre for the global art world. London today is defined by a rich influx of artists from Europe and beyond, mixing more than ever before with home-grown artistic talent. EXPANDER celebrates the capital’s unique identity as a dynamic, cosmopolitan meeting point, where diverse backgrounds and experiences are able to share a common language and cross-pollinate in a constantly changing environment. EXPANDER reflects the experiences of a bright, culturally footloose generation of artists, for whom art is the space in which to experiment with models for a truly hybrid culture.
Relying on a heady mix of imagination, fantasy and subversion, the artists in EXPANDER combine an acute sensitivity to contemporary experience to which they react while keeping in touch with the traditions of modern art. From romanticism to minimalism to pop, the artists in EXPANDER fuse these multiple traditions in a kaleidoscopic re-elaboration of a contemporary visual vocabulary. Visions of the natural world are refracted through virtuoso paint or through the synthetic drive of digital video; dirty urban experience are played against the futuristic ambitions of last-century modernism; hi-tech and low-fi visual elaborations playfully distort the squeaky-clean surface of commercial culture and graphic communications, or conversely overload them to the point of collapse. Throughout EXPANDER, ordinary life opens onto wild flights into the imagination, and comes face-to-face with the disruptive impulses of underground culture combined with new technology.
EXPANDER explores a generation of artists whose experience of locality, migration, and the ever-extending circuit of mass culture and international art, shapes the expanded creative drive of contemporary art for the 21st Century.
A full-colour catalogue, with essays and artists’ texts by writers JJ Charlesworth and Sally O’Reilly will be available.
Preview – Curator’s tour during the afternoon of the 15th October (call for details).
Private View – 7.30-10.30 pm 15th October
Public Opening times – 16th-24th October 10-6 pm,
For more information: 020 8533 9645 — info@expander.org.uk — www.expander.org.uk
Sponsored by Rowford Process