The Ladywell Tavern, to which we belong has won the Best Pub in Lewisham Award. This is a reflection of all the work put into both the pub and the gallery as well as the contribution it has been making to the Lewisham, and especially the Ladywell, community.
Its a lovely cozy pub with an open fire and a piano. The food is also really good so you should combine a visit tothe gallery with Sunday lunch or nice dinner one evening.
Check out the pub website: http://www.ladywelltavern.co.uk/
From Mud To Mortar presents four photographers attempting to capture individual viewpoints of the London landscape. From mud in East End canals to vast panoramas of the Thames, each of the artists has a unique perspective of the city they occupy.
Taken with a 1950's camera, Ziggy Grudzinskas' stunningly soft and ghostly landscapes are technical experiments, exploring the uses and the place of the more traditional manual camera in the context of modern digital photography. The photographs were created using a multiple exposure technique, as well as being scanned and composed later, which adds a depth and a history of sorts to rival the more 'polished' results gained from current digital techniques.
Adrian Hays' highly manipulated works have an almost CGI quality. These 'video game versions' of London posses a dark and abstract quality, contrasting an almost text-book, corporate glossy perfection with an underlying cinematic eeriness.
Alex Welensky's deliciously gritty images are somehow simultaneously very pure and very simple. Focusing on the texture of the landscape around the East End, Welensky's work often concentrates on dirt, rust, mud and decay – metaphors perhaps for the all that clots the dark heart of this great, yet at times loveless city. Composition, colour and attention to detail are key.
It is not surprising to find that as a photographer whose practice has its roots in reportage, Sheridan Flynn's photographs are the only ones with human bodies amongst the bricks.
Despite, or maybe because of this, there is a distinct lack of personal engagement in most of the images. No eye contact and often no faces at all. He negotiates these bodies as though they were pieces of street furniture, just more obstacles to walk around, and leaves the questions they silently pose unanswered. At times blending with the architecture, they are subtly lost in the advertising of the shops surrounding them.
What is so arresting about these collections of works is that they are hardly inhabited at all.
Beautifully capturing the wasteland of the 'transitional space' between beginning and end, the fall of industrial London and the rise of the new – there is a nothingness, a lack, in these works which existentially stands forward to be counted, and like Pierre in Sartre's café, is important precisely because of what is not there.
Tank is excited to introduce a presentation by well respected international artist and curator Karl-Heinz Jeron. His interest in shifting popular social perceptions involves using publicly available data, statistics, mathematics, web based media and cheap materials to create works that challenge the traditional ideas of production, value and ownership of the art world.
Mode2 KP deals with how our society transforms information into knowledge. It is about reflection and perception, about the competition between two languages mediating complexity. One is the language of science. The other one is the language of art which has to understand science but doesn't want to become it. The idea of what good science is or should be, the images of science and scientificity, are difficult to grasp but no less significant for it.
The presentation will be followed by Q&A and discussion session.
Karl-Heinz Jeron lives in Berlin. He studied Philosophy of Science and Logic and is the Lecturer for Multimedia Art at the University of Arts Berlin.
Artists Talk by Sally Kindberg Sunday 22nd Nov 2009 3pm
Sally Kindberg will talk about her work and her art practice. She will focus on the body of work shown in The Great Exhibition, most of the work was made especially for this show, inclusing the video piece Mood Swings - The Journey. Sally Kindberg may lead a special demonstration of the amazing meditative and relaxing qualities of this film. Following the talk there will bean informal discussion where the artist will answer questions from the audience.
After selling out on the opening night we now have more DVD's of Mood Swings- The Journy in stock and there will be signed copys available to buy on the day priced £5.
Tank Gallery the Ladywell Tavern 80 Ladywell Rd SE 13 7HS tankgallery@gmail.com
The Great Exhibition is a title that suggests some overwrought and overarching conceptual theme - perhaps a deconstruction of exhibition strategies or of reflections in the hall of mirrors of commodity fetishism - rendered in the cool tones of that conceptual minimalism that has become the tasteful aesthetic of contemporary art. You might think so but you would be wrong.
Sally Kindberg just doesn't do tasteful minimalism and the title is a red herring. She gave us painterly Y fronts in a gilt frame as her The Masterpiece for the 2008 Jerwood Contemporary Painting Prize, and in the 18 months since then has been producing new paintings that are always cockily fence-sitting between the sublime and the ridiculous.
This exhibition previews a selection of these new works and from the ghoulish bouffant and bow of The Horrible Kid to blanched grin of The Maniac there emerges a fuzzy logic where doubt and uncertainty have upended any rational science of vision. What emerges in its place is a kind of blurred clarity that celebrates the surreal disjunctions of everyday life.
The Great Exhibition also includes a new video work called Mood Swings, the journey which muzaks around with the flickering flame of Luv, and a persistent sculpture called The Thing of which the less said the better.
In a sense the only thing that really links The Great Exhibition to its namesake is that it also came to the Deep South (where it passed into myth leaving just a name and a football club). In this case there is at least something to see at the end of the journey and a pub attached for good measure.
South London based artist Chris Getliffe is most well known for his dark & subversive Illustrations. He adopts a minimalist high impact ‘pop art’ style heavily rooted in urban street art. Getliffe savagely attacks the media portrayal of what it is to be a successful ‘functioning’ human being. He works across multiple mediums with painting, illustration, & comics.
He has painted live on the walls of prestigious London venues such as Cargo & 93 Feet East. His work has been featured by the likes of Time Out, Disorder, Who’s Jack, & Gravity Guide. He has also produced work for Carhartt,We Hart Records, Artful, & Fix amongst many others
Against The Wall is a live painting performance, which will feature regularly in the Tank Gallery programme.Artists will be invited to create work directly onto the walls of the gallery space.
For the first of this series we have invited a local South London graffiti group to transform the gallery during the last weekend of the 'Brockley Max festival.' Feel free to come and watch them in action on the 5th 6th and 7th of June where they will be happy to chat and answer questions.
Tank Gallery,The Ladywell Tavern, 80 Ladywell Rd, SE13 7HS
Tank Gallery presents the solo exhibition A Stitch In Time by South London based artist Aoife van Linden Tol. Working primarily with explosives, Aoife van Linden Tol detonates small bombs to make imprints on paper, wood and metals. This collection of work uses the force and evidence of the explosions to explore perspectives of time.
Live Performance
The One I Love – Friday 29th May 4pm onwards
Please bring a photo of someone you love. Please bring them as early as possible.
Aoife will explode tiny hearts or tiny kisses onto the surface of the photograph.
Tank Gallery, The Ladywell Tavern, 80 Ladywell Rd, SE13 7HS
Tank gallery opened its doors for the first time with a dynamic cross-disciplined group show Think Tank. The exhibition offers an introduction to ten artists, some of which will hold solo shows here in the coming year. Think Tank aims to highlight the width and breath of styles and practices we aim to show at Tank Gallery. Featuring established international artists, recent graduates and previously un-shown artists alongside each other, we have presented an exciting taster of what is to come.
Think Tank will continue until the 3rd of May. We will also be hosting a late night opening on 30th of April featuring a talk by Berlin artist Christine Kriegerowski about Welcome to Wonderland, her projected collection of photographs on show.
