Ruth Barker
&
Fiona Shaw
CRIME SCENE
Installation, sculpture, drawing
September 1 to October 13, 2007
Opening reception: Friday, August 31, 2007, from 7pm
Galerie Adler Frankfurt am Main is pleased to announce CRIME SCENE, an exhibition of new work by young British artists Ruth Barker and Fiona Shaw. In it we find a litany of disjointed thoughts that offer strange and unacknowledged suggestions to the viewer – from the computer-generated heartbreak of Shaw’s binary party balloons to Barker’s grotesquely sexual male and female pelvis pair.
Both artists will show previously un-exhibited works, which focus on the darker side of life. Their practices are linked by a shared obsession with the unknown, the unsaid and the guessed, and a black gallows humour that emerges in the most inappropriate of ways.
Ruth Barker will show a group of new works that explore the strange familiarity we have with death. These pieces, by turns desirable, repellent and transfixing, evoke questions of our relationships to Nothingness and mortality. The new sculpture Black Pelvis on Copper on a Black Plinth by a Black Wall (While Nights Black Agents To Their Preys Do Rouse) is a dramatic addition to her body of practice.
Fiona Shaw will show a mixture of found object sculpture combined with intricate hand-crafted elements and new works on paper. Shaw’s customary use of break-up song lyrics adds a shop-bought romanticism to comically sinister scenarios exploring the coping mechanisms and social systems we use to deal with the wider world. Turn Around incorporates video and sound with assembled objects to create a poignant take on love, loss and ‘80s power ballads.
Crime Scene will draw together the work of both artists into a challenging, blackly comic, and brutal exhibition.
*1979 Leeds, UK
1998-01 Glasgow School of Art - BA Honours (1st Class with
Distinction) in Fine Art, specialising in Environmental Art
2002-04 Glasgow School of Art - MFA (Master of Fine Art)
2001-06 Co-founder and Co-director of Trajectory Publications
and Something Haptic
lives and works in Glasgow.
*1983 Margate, UK
Education
2003-06 BA (Hons) Fine Art Cumbria Institute of the Arts
2002-03 Foundation Diploma: Art & Design Blackpool & the Fylde
College
lives and works in Glasgow
parallely, in our subZONEs, we show
Roz Mortimer and Henry Coombes
Hanauer Landstraße 134, 60314 Frankfurt, Germany, +49 (0)69-43053962
mail@galerieadler.com, www.galerieadler.com