IMT Gallery

David Burrows – Night is also a Sun: G-lbl Hystr-c P-nc J-peg

Mark — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 12:38:58 +0000

‘Extinction Diagram (Infected)’, 2011

David Burrows – Night is also a Sun: G-lbl Hystr-c P-nc J-peg
13th January – 12th February 2012
Late Opening: Thursday 2nd February until 9pm

IMT Gallery is pleased to announce David Burrows’ first solo exhibition at the gallery.

Night is also a Sun: G-lbl Hystr-c P-nc J-peg is an exhibition of hand-cut paper cut-outs, mobiles and audio-visual work that addresses viral mutation, propagation, repetition and collapse. A collision between visual styles, the artifice of pictograms and the characteristics of the handmade is staged through mixing the analogue and the digital.

The exhibition has one proposition: ‘Pain is also joy, curse is also a blessing, night is also a sun…’ That is, the sun – an analogy for enlightenment – is eclipsed by the intensity of its after-image, (absolute vision is blind and blinding). The exhibited work draws upon traditional, folk and mass media artifacts such as Halloween silhouettes, Chinese paper cuts and flow diagrams and presents search-engine trash as good fortune charms, sigils and diagrams and symbols of anxiety and aspiration.

Burrows has exhibited extensively in the UK and abroad including the Chisenhale Gallery London, Arts Space Sidney, Museum of Art Marrakesh, Star Space Shanghai, Circulo des Bellas Artes, Madrid and the Mori Art Museum Tokyo. He participated in Macro/Micro: British Art 1996 – 2002, Kunsthalle Mucsarnok, Budapest. In addition to his solo art practice Burrows has often worked in collaboration, including collaborations with the artists’ group BANK, Bob & Roberta Smith and DJ Simpson. Since 2005, David Burrows has been collaborating with Simon O’Sullivan to produce the performance-fiction Plastique Fantastique, which has exhibited or performed at venues that include IMT Gallery London, Akershus Kunstsenter Lillestrom, Alice Day Gallery Brussels,Tate Britain and the Royal Academy of the Arts London. Burrows was selected for Becks Futures at the ICA in 2001 and received a Paul Hamlyn Visual Artists Award in 2003.

Errant Bodies Book Launch

Mark — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 12:53:41 +0000

Carrie Bodle, ‘Sonification / Listening Up’, 2005

Errant Bodies Book Launch
Friday 25th November 6:00 – 9:00pm

To coincide with Love is Colder than Death IMT Gallery are hosting a book launch of new titles by Errant Bodies including the second volume of Site of Sound: Of Architecture and the Ear.

The event will include a performative lecture by artist and writer Brandon LaBelle, whose solo exhibition Notes Toward a Sketch of a Sonic Body took place at IMT Gallery earlier this year.

Errant Bodies has been developing publishing projects since 1995. Since this time, it has been dedicated to supporting diverse discourses and projects in the fields of sonic and spatial practices, auditory culture and performativity, and experimental writing. The project further aims to consider the specifics of location, context and media, and the co-productive details generated from cultural work and its place, through site-based research, collective actions and collaborative projects.

Gordon Shrigley – Love is Colder than Death

Mark — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 09:52:14 +0000

‘Marker Drawing’, 2011

Gordon Shrigley – Love is Colder than Death
4th November – 11th December 2011
Open Thursday – Sunday 12 – 6pm

IMT Gallery is proud to present Gordon Shrigley’s Love is Colder than Death, a six-year investigation into Drawing and the Language of Line.

In 2001 Shrigley began a project to map out a lexicography of line: “At a certain point I felt I needed to relearn how to draw from scratch by concentrating on the simplest possible type of mark: the horizontal line and seeing where this would lead me.”

Love is Colder than Death follows this quixotic journey through different practices and modes of making, tracing lines between expressive drawing, architectural draughtsmanship, text and the tally mark; overlapping the signification of mark-making in different systems of communication.

At one point sketchbooks preserved in vitrines like museum artefacts contain years of lines. They sit in front of large pencil drawings, extraordinary works composed of individually drawn, straight horizontal lines forming a block of graphite that form a monument to shrigley’s conception of how conscious has developed through the engagement with the mark.

As the work progressed it began to incorporate the accidents of materials and the frustrations of external forces: the series of identical sketchbooks containing scores of horizontal line drawings abruptly changes in size when the only factory manufacturing them burns to the ground. Pages from different years reveal moments of frustration and of calm that, for Shrigley, are suggestive of contemporaneous personal events, like a symbolic polygraph through time.

Alongside these are text works, an architectural model for his forthcoming redesign of an East End gallery and a series of filmed interviews of artist filmmakers directed by Shrigley, into what it means to be a maker of the visual. The last of these are single takes of artists discussing their works in front of a motionless camera. The films play like talking heads or Andy Warhol’s screen tests, with an air of the Dogma 95 manifesto. Unedited they are stark and revealing documents of artists communicating their ideas and their struggle for meaning.

Gordon Shrigley studied at the University of Westminster and the Slade School of Fine Art. He has exhibited in the UK and abroad including Fruehsorge Contemporary Drawing, Berlin; the Musée d’art Moderne, Saint-Etienne and the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart. He has published a number of artists’ books and art texts with Edition Solitude, Stuttgart; Monaco Magazine, London and Cardboard Folly, Liverpool. He was selected for an artist in residency at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart in 1998 and at Hospitalfield House, Arbroath in 2000. His work is held in collections including the Staatsgalerie drawing and print collection, Stuttgart; Akademie Schloss Solitude archive, Stuttgart and the Musée d’art Moderne, Saint-Etienne.

Errant Bodies Book Launch and Talk
Friday 25th November 6:00 – 9:00pm

To coincide with Love is Colder than Death was a book launch of new titles by Brandon LaBelle’s Errant Bodies Publishing including the second volume of Site of Sound: Of Architecture and the Ear. Read on…

Epilogues: It Started with a Car Crash – Curator’s Tour with Charles Danby

Mark — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 16:06:51 +0000

Thomas Raat
Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue 2, 2011

Epilogues: It Started with a Car Crash
Curator’s Tour with Charles Danby
Saturday 15 October 11am

Curator-led tour of the exhibition Epilogues: It Started With A Car Crash at IMT Gallery. Introducing the work and practice of the five artists in the exhibition along with the wider aspects of the project through event and published format.

Free entry

Epilogues: It Started With A Car Crash is curated by Charles Danby and supported by the Arts Council England, OCA: Office for Contemporary Art Norway and 20 Projects.

It Started With A Car Crash: Alternative Educational Road Tour

Mark — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 15:53:20 +0000

IMT Gallery and 20 Projects present…
It Started With A Car Crash: Alternative Educational Road Tour
Tuesday 18 October 2:00 – 8:00pm
At the Slade Research Centre

The Bruce High Quality Foundation in Conversation with UK groups and collectives. Part of the exhibition Epilogues: It Started With A Car Crash at IMT Gallery curated by Charles Danby.

Free entry but places are limited. Please email roadtrip@20projects.co.uk to reserve a place.

Inspiring and enabling arts students to define the future of their own educational experience…

It Started With A Car Crash: Alternative Educational Road Tour seeks to open up a debate around alternative networks of education and artwork dissemination. The Bruce High Quality Foundation set up their own university in 2009 and in 2011 they embarked on a coast-to-coast road trip of America visiting educational institutions, project spaces, groups and individuals, documented in their work Teach 4 Amerika*. This is presented through an event in which the Bruce High Quality Foundation will be joined by UK based groups and collectives to share ideas on arts education.

The Bruce High Quality Foundation / The Free School / Arts Against Cuts / The Kurt Schwitters DIY School / David Burrows / This Is Not A School / The New International School

The event will be live-pressed by The Ladies of the Press with edited material being added to the publication It Started With A Car Crash.

The Slade School of Fine Art
Slade Research Centre
Woburn Square
London WC1H 0AB

Epilogues: It Started With A Car Crash is curated by Charles Danby and supported by the Arts Council England, OCA: Office for Contemporary Art Norway and 20 Projects.

*Teach 4 Amerika was produced in collaboration with Creative Time. Teach 4 Amerika is not affiliated with or endorsed by Teach For America.

Pigeon Magazine launch and film screening

Mark — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 12:56:24 +0000

Pigeon Magazine launch and film screening
Saturday 24th September 6pm – 9pm

As part of Epilogues: It Started with a Car Crash and Artist Books Weekend, Pigeon Magazine will launch their first published issue ‘Studio’, casting a perceptive eye over the role of the studio within current changing modes of artistic practice.

‘Studio’ is devoted to the relationship of artists to their places of work; mapping what an artist can and cannot be without their studio. The frustration of a removed physical studio space within the educational environment has led Pigeon to reach for a broader understanding of the very term studio.

In the late 1960s artists questioned and overturned the traditional modes of production, circulation and reception of artworks causing the notion of the studio to gradually diminish. The diffusion of the artistic workplace across globalised networks has led to the pervasive acknowledgment of the ‘post-studio’ era. In the case of the post-studio Pigeon considers the lengths to which the term does justice to the current nature of the space and place of art production. There is an ongoing debate within art education about the necessity and significance of providing art students with a studio. In an era where students work ever more systematically, does an architectural or institutional workspace remain valid?

Pigeon questions the connection between the artist and the physical space of their activity. Pigeon ask us to pay the studio a visit, to consider the innumerable spaces where artists are at work, creating along the way a studio of image, text, paper and glue.

Contributors include Mateus Domingos, Mike Stubbs, Leo Powell and Vanilla Galleries.

Alongside the launch, Pigeon present a connected film series of ‘moving portraits’ inviting viewers to enter the usually private workspaces of artists including Bill Culbert and Mike Stubbs. Unexpected and unforeseen moments are captured, projecting Pigeon’s perception of the artists at work, their studios and the transition of their work from the studio to public presentation.

Pigeon Magazine
Artist Books Weekend

As part of Epilogues: It Started With A Car Crash the event is supported by the Arts Council England, OCA: Office for Contemporary Art Norway and 20 Projects.

Epilogues: It Started With A Car Crash

Mark — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 12:34:59 +0000

The Bruce High Quality Foundation
The Gate, not the idea of the Thing but the Thing itself, 2005

Epilogues: It Started With A Car Crash
17th September – 23rd October 2011
Curator’s talk with Charles Danby: Saturday 15th October 11am
Late openings: Thursday 6th October and Saturday 15th October until 9pm

The Bruce High Quality Foundation
Ray Johnson
Alastair MacKinven
Thomas Raat
Vibeke Tandberg
Curated by Charles Danby

Epilogues: It Started With A Car Crash examined how artists address the contexts, ideologies, and histories that surround them in the work of their contemporaries and predecessors.

The exhibition looked at the nature of archives, ideas of dialogue and exchange, and of education both inside and against educational institutions; a timely response to today’s climate of cultural and institutional instability.

Vibeke Tandberg’s works, produced across multiple media, cut through handed-down, inherited, and culturally generated mythologies of gender and identity. Her video work Old Man going up and down a Staircase (2003), showed a manipulated self-portrait (whilst pregnant) of the artist dressed as an old man, connect through multiple channels to the work, lifestyle, and myth making of Marcel Duchamp, whilst the silhouetted portraits from her more recent (2010) Winehouse Variation (Amy) works add further dimension to this interplay.

Alongside was a new and significant work by Thomas Raat, a 1:1 scale replica in vinyl adhesive of Barnett Newman’s Who’s afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III (1966-67) following its vandalism at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam in 1986. An extension of an earlier series (from 2006), Thomas Raat shows the slashes to be irreversible marks that confront and collapse ideas of singular and stationary origin. Also showing by Thomas Raat is the work, Das Sprechen (2010) which is a turnaround of the celebrated piece Das Schweigen von Marcel Duchamp wird Überbewertet (The Silence Of Marcel Duchamp Is Overrated) (1964) by Josef Beuys.

Duchamp remained a haunting presence and recurring point of focus for Ray Johnson who, through Black Mountain College and the New York Correspondence School, challenged institutional orthodoxies and initiated the mail art programme. Epilogues: It Started With A Car Crash included selected, unseen mail art pieces that highlight the control, sharpness and play of Johnson’s conversational exchange and reflect the connective nature of his legacy to other works in the exhibition.

Alastair MacKinven’s All the things you could be now if Robert Smithson’s wife was your mother (2008) is an archival record of a performance that restages the making of Nancy Holt’s earthwork Star Crossed (1979). In conjunction with its title the work concludes as the artist crawls naked through the work, contesting the agency of inheritance and handed down futures.

Nancy Holt’s husband Robert Smithson also features in works by The Bruce High Quality Foundation. The Gate (2005) is a documented performance in which the Collective set about installing a scale replica of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s The Gates (2005) onto Robert Smithson’s Floating Island to Travel around Manhattan Island (1970/2005). The Collective’s work draws on the circumstance of two unrelated works presented in New York in 2005.

In conjunction with Epilogues: It Started With A Car Crash there was the offsite event It Started With A Car Crash: Alternative Educational Road Tour at the Slade Research Centre and a Pigeon Magazine launch and film screening at IMT Gallery in association with the Artist Books Weekend:

Pigeon Magazine launch and film screening
Saturday 24th September 6pm – 9pm

Pigeon Magazine launched their first published issue, casting a perceptive eye over the role of the studio within current changing modes of artistic practice. Read on…

It Started With A Car Crash: Alternative Educational Road Tour
Tuesday 18th October 2pm – 8pm at Slade Research Centre, Woburn Square, London WC1H 0AB
Read on…

It Started With A Car Crash: Alternative Educational Road Tour sought to open up a debate around alternative networks of arts education and artwork dissemination. The Bruce High Quality Foundation set up their own University in 2009, and in 2011 they embarked on a coast-to-coast road trip of America visiting educational institutions, project spaces, groups and individuals, documented in their work Teach4Amerika (2011). This was presented through the event in which the Bruce High Quality Foundation was joined by UK based groups and collectives including the Kurt Schwitters Summer School to open and share ideas on arts education.

Also accompanying Epilogues: It Started With A Car Crash is It Started With A Car Crash a publication produced from invited contributions from publishing collectives, zine artists, and writers. Contributors include Pigeon Magazine, The Ladies of the Press, IRP and ZEENE.

Epilogues: It Started With A Car Crash was curated by Charles Danby and supported by the Arts Council England, OCA: Office for Contemporary Art Norway and 20 Projects.

Lucy Beech and Edward Thomasson – TWIST

Mark — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 16:10:29 +0000

’7 Year Itch’, 2011
Performed at Bloomsbury Theatre, London

Lucy Beech and Edward Thomasson – TWIST
Thursday 4th August 6:00 – 9:00pm

IMT Gallery is pleased to present ‘TWIST’, a new performance by London based artists Lucy Beech and Edward Thomasson.

TWIST, 2011 focuses on the potential that performed actions have in displaying meaning and communicating narratives. A Solo performer is observed and later joined by a small group in a movement based presentation within the gallery space. Meandering between Chiropractory, First Aid and Latin dance, and underscored with live sound construction, TWIST presents movement as a form of therapeutic release, a strategy that can be learnt through instruction and performed in the safety of one another’s company.

Collaboratively Beech and Thomasson’s practice recognises the limitless possibility and potential in the unsettling distance between the audience and ‘stage’. They utilise repetitive body based movement and employ the rhetoric of theatre as a strategy to intensify this gap rendering the audience unable to repose into one mode of experience.

Beech and Thomasson’s recent collaborations include: 7 Year Itch, More Soup and Tart, Barbican Theatre, London; Holding it Together, Night and Day, Modern Art Oxford; The Cigarette Game, Testing Ground: Live, Zabludowicz Collection, London and in Making Mistakes at Paradise Row, London.

Lucy Beech and Edward Thomasson’s exhibition ‘One Another’s Company‘ is currently showing at the gallery until the 21st August 2011.

Supported by the Arts Council England.

Thomas Müller – Touching Relating Dividing

Mark — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 13:31:49 +0000

‘Untitled’, 2009 by Thomas Muller
Pencil and acrylics on telefax

Thomas Müller – Touching Relating Dividing (off-site)
7th July 2011 18:00 – 21:00

IMT Gallery and The Centre For Recent Drawing are pleased to present the book launch of ‘Touching Relating Dividing’ by Thomas Müller at X Marks the Bökship, London.

‘Touching Relating Dividing’ is a detailed monograph of the German artist Thomas Müller edited by Artist and Director of the Centre For Recent Drawing, Andrew Hewish, as part of the ‘Documents for Recent Drawing’ Monograph series.

Through his drawings Müller investigates the endless possibilities of all kinds of material on paper through a combination of ink, pen, pencil and oil paint, he creates multifaceted sets of drawings, which evoke contrasts and interactions. Another characteristic element is his arrangement of the works, which he installs as incomplete sets that spatialise and infinitely extend the series.

Thomas Müller was born in Germany in 1959. He has exhibited widely throughout Europe, including: Patrick Heide Gallery, London, Gallery Vidal-Saint Phalle, Paris, Fruesorge Contemporary Drawing, Berlin, Gallery Schégl, Zürich and The Centre For Recent Drawing, London. He lives and works in Stuttgart.

The book also includes an essay on drawing by Gordon Shrigley, artist and founder of Marmalade – publishers of visual theory and the transcript of an interview between Thomas Müller, Andrew Hewish and Dominic Rich.

The launch evening included a short introduction by Andrew Hewish and a selective reading of his text piece ‘By Dint Of A Coarse Inscription’ by Gordon Shrigley.

The book launch took place next door to IMT Gallery at:

X Marks the Bökship
Unit 3/210 Cambridge Heath Road
London E2 9NQ
bokship.org

X Marks the Bökship is a project space for independent publishers. Specialising in publishing book works and projects by artists and designers and stocks books and journals by independent publishers. For more information please visit X Marks the Bökship

IMT Gallery at Banner Repeater

Mark — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 13:00:19 +0000

Still from ‘Simple Movements for a Meaning – Secret’ by Carlos Noronha Feio

IMT Gallery at Banner Repeater
Books launch with performances by Plastique Fantastique, Carlos Noronha Feio and Gordon Shrigley
8th July 2011 6:00 – 9:00pm

IMT Gallery is pleased to present a selection of publications accompanied by live performance at Banner Repeater, London.

From the 8th July Banner Repeater, a radical art space on Platform 1 of Hackney Downs Station, will be hosting a selection of titles published by IMT Gallery, books on artists represented by the gallery, a series of DVD’s by Filmarmalade and book works by Marmalade – publishers of visual theory.

To coincide with this collaboration with IMT Gallery, Banner Repeater presented the video performance ‘Simple Movements for a Meaning – Secret’ by Carlos Noronha Feio, a live performance by Plastique Fantastique and ‘A Reading across the Lines’ by Gordon Shrigley.

Banner Repeater
Platform 1
Hackney Downs Station
Dalston Lane
E8 1LA

Banner Repeater is an artist run reading room and project space founded by Ami Clarke and located on platform 1 Hackney Downs overground station. The reading room holds a collection of artist’s books and printed material for browsing and purchase and runs a programme of exhibitions and events. For more information please visit

Banner Repeater

Filmarmalade is an artist run project established by Gordon Shrigley to publish on DVD selected artistsʼ films and video works, so as to encourage a wider access to the moving image and to allow a greater understanding, through specially commissioned interviews. For more information please visit Filmarmalade

IMT Gallery is a contemporary art gallery based in East London, founded by Lindsay Friend in 2005. The gallery exhibits emerging and established artists working across all media and specialises in installation, sound art and Polish new media art. The gallery represents: David Burrows, Corrado Morgana, Carlos Noronha Feio, Alejandro Ospina, Gordon Shrigley, NaoKo TakaHashi, Kate Terry and Mark Peter Wright.