Acme Project Space
44 Bonner Rd
London
E2 9JS
PV: 6pm-8pm 6th June 2013
Thurs-Sun 1-6pm or by appointment
7th - 30th June 2013
Vernacular Hangover is an exhibition of new work by Ben Cove conceived for the Acme Project Space. New paintings will be hung on top of, and alongside, large-scale reproductions of American press photographs from an early 1970s Primitive Art exhibition. Cove’s work examines the physical and social legacies of Modernist practices and its associated languages. Initially trained in architecture, earlier work utilised a broad range of media to focus on particular strains of Modernist architecture and design. These concerns have expanded out in the painting language that Cove has developed over recent years into an exploration of seemingly incongruous phenomena; the universal and the vernacular, the functional and the decorative, brashness and sobriety, abstraction and representation. Always aware of the physicality of the painting as an object, Cove’s paintings are often made to be hung in conjunction with other elements. Several works in the show will consist of paintings which sit alongside partially painted, wall and floor mounted plywood structures. The exhibition will be accompanied by an essay by curator and writer George Vasey.
' A painting is never just purely compositional; to make a line is to assert both an aesthetic and ethical position. Modernist Abstraction was all about these divisions; you and me, us and them, figurative and abstract.
Ben Cove’s paintings invoke a particular strand of Modernist Abstraction, yet one attuned to his own conditions. If Modernism was a response to its own technological advancements (aviation, industrialism, and the machine) then Cove’s paintings are informed by new abstractions (economic, social, and digital.) Where Modernism was oppositional, Cove collapses these dialectics. His paintings are at once heraldic, and diagrammatic, provisional yet monumental. Cove’s new paintings invoke Modernist Abstraction while offering a necessary corrective to its pathologies. We could be looking at an unbuilt home, a logo for a multinational corporation or simply two lines intersecting within a nebulous environment. Cove understands that while the Modernist project was about purging narratives and metaphors we can’t help but use the surface of an abstract painting as a type of mirror to reflect our own narratives back at us. '
George Vasey
dowload the Press Release as a PDF >
www.acme.org.uk/projectspace
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