Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to announce our participation at Frieze London 2016. A series of three solo exhibitions by Hans-Peter Feldmann, Paulina Olowska and Sarah Crowner will be presented over the duration of the fair. Each solo booth has been conceived by the artist specifically for the context of the fair:
Wednesday 5 October: Hans-Peter Feldmann
Hans-Peter Feldmann is a conceptual artist and compulsive collector and appropriator of found images and everyday ephemera. His oeuvre incorporates photography, sculpture, installation, drawing and painting. For Frieze London Feldmann presents a series of 16 paintings installed on custom made stands, reflecting his longstanding interest in painting as art object and the currency of images. These traditional, gilt-framed portraits of couples, children, pets, soldiers and women have been carefully selected and sourced from auctions by Feldmann before systematically subverting them with his trademark black lines, red noses and cross-eyes. This installation invites visitors to make connections as they weave through a maze of playful, upended representations of youth, class, nostalgia, sexuality, war and beauty.
Thursday 6 & Friday 7 October: Paulina Olowska
Working in painting, performance and installation Paulina Olowska’s work often focuses on forgotten figures of feminism, minor histories, consumerism and popular aesthetics, quoting period fashion photography, agitprop posters, graffiti, periodicals and, signage she also often collaborates with others. For Frieze London Olowska presents a series of collages, ceramics and paintings based on avant-garde playwright Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz’s play The Mother from 1924. In 2015 Olowska transformed a room in the Poetry and Dream collection display at Tate Modern into an installation and theatre set for a performance The Mother an Unsavoury Play in Two Acts and an Epilogue. The room became a domestic interior inhabited by artist’s works from Tate’s collection including Meredith Frampton, Dora Carrington and Henri Matisse and reflected Olowska’s interest in the appropriation of histories and the function of painting as a fictional space. The story was set in a bourgeois setting in which hallucinations, schizophrenia, alcoholism, madness and drug addiction turn into surrealist mayhem. Two professional actors play the role of the mother and the son, while Olowska’s friends and collaborators took on characters including the maid, the prostitute, the aristocratic party boy and the suspicious individual. The works presented at Frieze reflect the darkly comic and dynamic spirit of the performance.
Saturday 9 & Sunday 10 October: Sarah Crowner
Sarah Crowner embraces the idea of painting as object and her works embody the experience of architecture and space both within themselves and their display. For Frieze London Crowner exhibits four new large ceramic tile paintings alongside four new ceramic tiled table works that situate the visitor at the heart of the installation. The wall and tables works incorporate a hand-made pentagon tile with five different length sides, (recently discovered by mathematicians), which can only repeat when the tile is matched with its mirror. The two reflecting tiles suggest an open book, butterfly wings, or leaf-like panels and illustrate Crowner’s interest in systems and patterns, production and reproduction, in culture and nature. This deliberate relationship to the tactile, to craft and the artist’s performative engagement with her medium suggests a three-dimensional, physical, relationship to the image and speaks to the viewer of action and the potentiality of painting.
