Steve Green - Peter Lamb
Private view Monday 8 October from 6pm
Exhibition runs 9 October - 18 October
Zero10 Gallery is pleased to present the first instalment of our annual Frieze Art Fair celebration. This year we will exhibit an artist duo that we feel reflect our ethos and are worthy of attention.
Steve Green and Peter Lamb, irrespective of materials and production, address the individual via a poignant reflection upon various and varying issues, which to them are close to home. They present art making as an investigation of individual obsessions and intent, which deals with theoretical positions but never at the cost of their own cognitive decisions; both artists prioritise their own interiorised concerns. The results of such introspection range from the abject to the celebratory, but fundamentally both artists are detectives of the Self.
Glimpses and samples of Aztec sun worship, the occult, pagan ritual, Native American totem and folkloric decoration are present in the sculptural work of Steve Green as he plunders the belief systems of metaphysical shapes and objects. However his use of sleek, highly polished acrylic and glossy petro-chemical colour is loaded with the surface and design elements of the sign, freed from direct signification, to instead connote a more general mysticism. Green attempts to communicate without absolute, relying on an interpretation that objects hold certain transcendental properties to more receptive onlookers.
(Ross Downes)
The gestural vigour of Peter Lamb's latest paintings at first suggests inspiration from abstract expressionism and even from the automatic techniques used by the Surrealists. However exposure to the warren of marks that complicate these surfaces relates the artist's ideas more closely to an American painter who, while an admirer of Jackson Pollock, was also a critic of Pollock's elevation of personal biography into painterly style as personal as a signature. Lamb also promotes inscrutability about meaning with concentrations of strokes, shapes and textures. Gestures are his own and, conceivably, other people's; authorship cannot be vouched for throughout an expanse of painting. Some elements are clearly not actual, physical registrations (and, therefore, marks of authenticity) but marks that have been photographed, with the photograph then worked upon by being overlaid with new matter. What is more, the photograph reproduces shapes that could fall outside the general ambit of aesthetic consideration.
(Martin Holman 2012)
Address: 18 Newman Street, London, W1T 1PE
