Adi Rosenblum and Markus Muntean have been working in partnership since 1992 and have developed a joint signature style that questions the notion of authorship. For this exhibition they created a new video work, It Is Never Facts That Tell, which explored the futility of protest in contemporary society, and a sculpture, At the Beginning…, that referred to the graphic language of the Russian Constructivist movement. Constructivist art was already influential in many contemporary magazines and Muntean/Rosenblum revealled how even revolutionary movements can be subsumed by mass consumerism and become simply another fashion or style.
The project was curated by Katharine Stout and was Tate’s first collaboration with London Undergound’s Platform for Art project.
Glasgow-based artist, Claire Barclay’s sculptural installations balance elements of function and dysfunction, chaos and order, in a precarious equilibrium. Her work pivots around the physical and psychological tensions set up between contrasting components, pitching the organic against the synthetic, the hard against the soft, openness against confinement.
Half-light, Barclay’s project for Art Now, consisted of separate zones, each linked through the loose metaphor of the owl while maintaining their autonomy. Steeped in mythology and a cipher of contradictory beliefs, this predatory creature has variously been associated with wisdom and death, good fortune and witchcraft. Through the juxtaposition of elements of shelter and protection with those of capture and entrapment, Barclay created a seductive environment charged with an undertone of threat.
The project was curated by Lizzie Carey-Thomas.
David Thorpe’s body of work to date considers the extent to which pictures, and more recently sculptural objects, offer pathways to new orders of experience. Thorpe considers this constructed ‘world’ of the art object as an ambiguously privileged and paranoid domain.
His installation, The Colonist, demonstrated the extent to which the artist’s world had expanded from the image world to include the gallery space in four dimensions. Elements of sculpture and architecture are now integral to the work. Installed together, the objects and pictures in this exhibition set up complex chains of connection. The sculptures on display doubled as practical objects which might feature in the world of Thorpe’s images, and as simple aesthetic objects.
The project was curated by Catherine Wood.
Jananne Al-Ani’s The Visit (2004) was a two-part video installation in which repeated scenes of a mysterious figure pacing in an empty landscape were contrasted with a series of conversational exchanges between a group of young women.
The Visit was Al-Ani’s most ambitious project to date and added to an impressive body of video and photographic work, distinguished by its finely-honed, evocative portraits and complex, often intimate narratives. The Visit was commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella and Norwich Gallery. This exhibition coincided with the launch of Al-Ani’s monograph published by Film and Video Umbrella.
Andrew Grassie is a realist painter whose beautifully crafted works engage with complex conceptual ideas. The starting point for Grassie’s work is a re-examination of the fundamental question of what to paint. Thus his detailed, small-scale tempera paintings present a series of compelling self-reflexive propositions, recording and representing scenarios such as the circumstances of their own production or display.
For Art Now Grassie, at intervals over the past year, selected key British and International works from Tate’s collection and hung them in the Art Now space. Working from photographs of these temporary installations he made a series of paintings depicting the Art Now space which brought these works together to create a record of an ‘implausible’ exhibition, and which questioned the viewer’s sense of reality, presence, space and illusion.
The project was curated by Ben Tufnell.
Ranging from three-dimensional models of the rods and cones of the eye to large-scale screen prints and traditional portrait painting, Michael Fullerton's individual works appear to share little aesthetic common ground. However, all explore the processes involved in the recording and transmission of information. His materials and methods often directly reference the tools and technologies of communication, such as newsprint or videotape, while his portraits have depicted social commentators such as the late John Peel. While associations are far-reaching, Fullerton's works collectively form an ongoing investigation into the relationship between subject, aesthetics and the creative process.
The project was curated by Lizzie Carey-Thomas.
This Art Now exhibition presented new work by artist Martin Westwood. Westwood makes complex sculptural installations that are concerned with the investigation of social and psychological spaces. Commerce is a dominant theme in his work, particularly the way that economic structures influence our daily lives.
Westwood works with mass-produced materials collected from the corporate environment – paperclips, carpet tiles, vinyl stickers and newspapers – which he transforms through idiosyncratic processes of destruction and reconstruction to form highly crafted components for his larger installations.
For this exhibition, Westwood transformed the Art Now space with a large-scale installation conceived especially for the gallery. Working with imagery that depicted the commercial space of the car-showroom, he constructed a multi-layered environment to further engage with ideas of human communication and corporate culture.
The project was curated by Rachel Tant.
Silke Otto-Knapp is a painter who works in the often-marginalised medium of watercolour. Unlike traditional watercolourists Otto-Knapp works on canvas, which allows her to repeatedly wash down her images, reworking them layer by layer, and therefore create pictures of great translucency and delicacy; effects enhanced by her recent use of silver and gold pigments.
Otto-Knapp typically works from photographic images and uses her materials ‘in such a way as to bring the transparent quality of the paint into conflict with the clarity of the photographic image.’ While her work always addresses the practice of painting through its concerns with the physicality of paint and surface, her subjects have ranged from the Botanical Gardens at Kew to the nostalgic glamour of Busby Berkeley musicals. The works in this exhibition were derived from photographs documenting dance performances, with a number inspired by images of Igor Stravinsky’s Les Noces.
The project was curated by Ben Tufnell.
Jamie Shovlin is interested in the tension between truth and fiction, reality and invention. His painstakingly researched and executed works combine inherently flawed systems, pseudo-scientific exactitude and doubtful philosophical propositions with the seemingly objective experience of the archive. Shovlin’s work questions the way in which we map and classify the world around us in order to understand it.
For Art Now, Shovlin created new work which uses the conventions of museological display and wildlife documentaries. Using drawings, collage, text, sound recordings and projections, the installation explored a juxtaposition of his mother’s subjective view of the wildlife in her suburban garden with the scientific rigour of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, as set out in The Origin of Species (1859).
The project was curated by Ben Tufnell.
