Alex Farrar: Ecstatic, darkling with lofty, fumble/Reverie, angst, bumble and grumble/Lucid, limned with Rubin’s cornice and fifteen-odd semblable stumps

Dürst Britt & Mayhew is proud to present Ecstatic, darkling with lofty, fumble/Reverie, angst, bumble and grumble/Lucid, limned with Rubin’s cornice and fifteen-odd semblable stumps, British artist Alex Farrar’s second solo exhibition at the gallery.

With a systemic approach to art making Alex Farrar produces exhibitions that blur the line between artwork and context. He makes groupings of works that explore the bodily as a liminal space between our psychological world and our social lives. Farrar uses a range of sculptural, painting and print making techniques in complex relationships with their forms: often referencing the body and its residues directly, and content: emotional states ranging from longing to optimism, irritation to nervousness. Four distinct series of new works – night sweat paintings, semblable forest, a gestalt cornice and ‘umble prints – coalesce in a scene that combines traces of the lived body with paranoiac visions and pataphysical logic.

 Suggesting metopes in a classical frieze, the night sweat paintings form a procession of headless writhing bodies captured on downy bed linens. Following the series of sweat paintings made in 2017 and 2018 (that were debuted at ARCO Madrid), Farrar has found in the more intimate subject of night sweat the body in repose, stressed not by any external presence but an imagined one. For these new works the artist applies a silicone based paint on various textiles commonly used as bed linen. The organic forms depicted are drawn from various acquaintances of the artist who volunteered their silhouetted sleeping positions. With a nod towards the Anthropometry paintings of Yves Klein, they share with Farrar’s previous sweat works a disconcerting materiality that is poised between the abject and the divine.

Semblable forest is a disturbing assembly of young trees felled upon reaching maturity. Made using a variation of the lost wax technique, with found tree stumps surrounded by plaster before they are incinerated, their voids replaced with bronze which is then broken out of the mold. Occupying the floorspace of the booth these modest monuments with trunks the span of your wrist and roots that reach out pointlessly, situate the exhibition space in the midst of an unseen act of destruction.

Taken together these examples reflect the shifting perspective that runs throughout the exhibition’s exploration of lived experience. Across the grouping our perception is mirrored in an exchange between the interior (psychic) life of a body and its exterior (somatic) experience. This is a continuum, a splitting of the flesh that is literally illustrated by the gestalt cornice’s evocation of the faces–vase demonstration of figure–ground perception. Here the (speaking) profile of a face is extruded to ring the perimeter of the presentation with the suggestion that the negative ‘ground’ of the exhibition space is as material as they are.

Much of the contents of the new works can be found in an embryonic state in the ‘umble prints, where a scattershot collection of heads, contorted faces, fingernails, crab shells, snakeskins amass on a backdrop of open textbooks. Printed in bright, bold colours with a risograph duplicator, their individual titles, ‘Jumble’, ‘Fumble’, ‘Stumble’ etc. belie the fragility of their making and the thread of vulnerability, weakness and precarity that runs throughout the presentation.

Alex Farrar (*1986, lives and works in Amsterdam and London) studied at Leeds Metropolitan University (Leeds, UK), Gerrit Rietveld Academie (Amsterdam) and Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (Amsterdam, NL). Recent and forthcoming solo/duo exhibitions include Bloc Projects, Sheffield (2019), SE8, London (2019), Onomatopee with Philippine Hoegen, Eindhoven (2018), ARCO Madrid with Dürst Britt & Mayhew, Madrid (2018), and de Appel Arts Centre, Amsterdam (2016). He has recently participated in group exhibitions at Copperfield Gallery, London (2018) and The Great Medical Disaster, Manchester (2017). In 2019 he will participate in a group exhibition at ChaSaMa in New York.