Anna Hughes | Waypoint opening 25.02.2012 at 6.00 p.m. 28.02.2012 - 14.04.2012
Artericambi is pleased to present a solo exhibition by the artist Anna Hughes. In her paintings, this young British artist has often suggested a romantic imaginative world where the idyllic encounter with nature produces a feeling of uneasiness which, at the same time, attracts and warns us. Anna Hughes’ paintings are familiar and evocative, the style recalls romantic painting where the beauty and immensity of nature opens up to a contradictory sense of the sublime. Even though we have the most sophisticated systems of provision, security and simulation at our disposal, we cannot prevent the emergence of primitive fears. The Romantic attitude has been the object of a rationalistic and positivist repression, as faith in scientific and economical progress has made us forget our human limits. As Jean François Lyotard remarked, the sublime is not only a feeling coming from the encounter with nature, it also comes from the encounter with the technology that today seems to dominate our life. Today we have the impression that we are controlled by an immense machine that imposes its rhythms of production upon us. Like the robots that comes to life, examples of the Freudian uncanny, technology is confronting us with the otherness and familiar strangeness of our industry. That’s the point where we can situate Anna Hughes images. They are examples of the uncanny, familiar pictures producing an anxious feeling of strangeness. Theses works tug at something which comes from the deepest part of unconscious. In the new body of work presented in this exhibition, the romantic style of Hughes’ painting is coupled with an acute anxiety. Threads are stitched into strict patterns on the canvas, across images of apolcalyptic looking clouds. The paint is thin, seeming to be stained into the fabric, the pale tones making an uncomforatble contrast with imagery. For the first time in her work, some canvasses have become stripped bare of imagery and take on a clean rationalized sythnthesis of her ideas in abstract form. The work grapples with a battle between the rational and emotional, the romantic and the apocalyptic, and a sense of everything being on the brink of collapse. Titles such as ‘squadron’, ‘fallout’ and ‘lights out’ bring suggestions of war, while the stitched patterns draw assosiations with aircraft, spaceships, pixels, targets, stars, and waypoints. Anna Longo
ARTERICAMBI Via A.Cesari 10, 37131 Verona +390458403684/+393351330087 artericambi@yahoo.it | www.artericambi.org
Residencies ‘Interno4’, Bologna, Italy, with Portable Isolation Unit, 2012 'Copenhagen Place', London, UK, 2012 http://copenhagenplace.com/ Projects 2011- current date Portable Isolation Unit www.portableisolationunit.com Website anna-hughes.com Publications ‘A Happy Life in the Mountains’, hand bound, riso printed catalogue for the Artist collective Portable isolation Unit, 2011 ‘Teller’ Issue 2, published by Teller, Uk, 2011,http://tellermagazine.com/ ‘Anachronisms and Interferences’ limited edited of 150 published by Catherdral, Switzerland,2009 - www.read-cathedral.ch Private Collections Sammlung Sør Rusche Stephan Landwehr, Grill Royal, Berlin and other private collections in Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany.
ANNA HUGHES | WAYPOINT
ANNA LONGO ANNA HUGHES
noi domanda
25.01.2012
Painting had been considered a dead medium since the late 60s and 70s. At that time artists were engaged in a criticism of representation: they wanted to emancipate art from the traditional role of imitating nature and expressing feelings. Then painting come back as a way of reconsidering tradition and of playing with history in a creative way. While it was criticizing the false pretentions of originality, postmodern painting decided that it was time to assume that art is nothing but elaboration of preexisting signs and that it is not possible to reach any deeper or higher truth. Why are you using painting today? It’s is a false statement to say that painting has been considered a dead medium since the 60’s and 70’s. This was an opinion held by a certain set of people at a certain time and it would be a big generalization to cast across the whole spectrum of what was going on at that time and what has happened since. The history of art is endangered if it puts too much weight on what was happening in one place and ignores what might have been happening in another. It’s important take heed of the bias that has swung from one genre to another depending on the particular interests or opinions of the favoured art critics or theorists of the moment. These things have always been mutually perpetuated by the art markets, and by the political and economic influences of the time. There is and always will be a multiplicity of movements at any one time. Art should be about seeking after some kind of truth, to reveal and interrogate things about the world around us in order for transformation to take place. Painting has never ceased to be a medium that fascinates both artists and their audiences, and to be able to reinvent itself and it’s possibilities for expression continuously, from ideas about it’s form, and the medium itself, to its position in the history of art, to a political tool of expression, to a subject of contention which many conceptual artists reference.
In his the theory of “dialectical images”, Walter Benjamin thought that any present is connected with a specific period of the past and that images from this past are close to the new sensibility. Do you think that our present is contemporary of romantic way of feeling? Romanticism seems to continually re-ermerge in every generation, apperaing in many different forms. In the last 50 years we’ve seen widely acknowledged examples such as the St.Ives artists in the 50’s, then the hippy movements in the 60’s and 70’s, the new romantics of the 1980’s, the mysical cults of the 1990’s. It’s always easier to look back in retrospect to see these waves and how romantic temperaments have always rejected and often sought extreme alternatives to the world around them, almost always in reaction to the political situation of the time. One among many counter reactions to ‘modern life’, was the appearance of the Neo Romantic movement in British Art, a collective project than began after the 2ndWW, primarily concerned with an intensely heightened identification with nature. Their work tells of a turn away from thier society in search for spiritual or moral values behind or through the appearance of nature.
A.H. In my new work, a romantic style is put on edge by a sense of acute anxiety. The paint is thin, and stained in layers onto the fabric in calm, pale tones that make an unsettling contrast with a kind of latent sense of instability in the imagery that wavers between apocalyptic and mythological. New elements have come into the work. Before I was overlaying painted geometric elements over a background. This time, I've begun to stitch thread into strict patterns made up of squares and triangles, onto the canvas before applying the paint. For the first time in my work, some canvasses are stripped bare of imagery and take on a clean rationalized sythnthesis of my ideas in abstract form in stitched pattern. I've been thinking about the struggle between rational and emotional thought processes, the romantic and the apocalyptic, and a sense of everything being on the brink of collapse. Titles such as ‘squadron’, ‘fallout’ and ‘lights out’ bring suggestions of war, while the small stitched elements draw assosiations with aircraft, spaceships, pixels, targets, stars, and waypoints, yet at the same time represent none of the above in any kind of figurative way.
24.01.2012
A. The rhythm of our conversation, is marked by a free timeline. Questions and answers follow each other without a specific pattern favoring the daily evolution of our day. You are now engaged in the making up of new paintings to be exhibited at Artericambi. What are you working on now?
I am currently reading ‘The Roots of Romantisicm’ by Isiah Berlin. It’s interesting to see how romantisicm in art and literature emerged from the enlightenment as an emotional reaction to a new predominant insistance of scientific rules of order and logic, also at the time of huge industrial revolutions and changes when there was a huge sense of loss for a certain way of life and in particular the changes upon the countryside. J.F Lyotard’s theory of the sublime looks at how in the experience of modern life, globalized communications technologies have given rise to a perception of the everyday as de-stabilizing and excessive. He describes how the sublime experience is fundamentally transformative and about the relationship between order and disorder, and the disruption of the stable co-ordinates of time and space. The sublime describes a moment when thought comes to an end and we encounter something which is ‘other’.
Your paintings evoke a feeling of “uncanny”, as it has been defined by Freud. The landscapes are pleasant, peaceful and familiar, but they summon up a kind of anxiety. They are like a dream that is going to turn in a nightmare. The beholder feels a kind of uneasiness as the innocent beauty of the scene was hiding a mystery. It’s like you want the public to make a specific experience that affects his emotions. Is it important for you to put the spectator in this specific emotional situation and experience? Ideas of loss, separation, uncertainty and temporality are key to my work. I have been focusing on the qualities of the paint as an equivalent to the metaphysical and psychological states of groundlessness and to convey atmospheres of transition and of instability. Varnishes and glazes coupled with the fluidity of paint help to convey a sense that the very structure of the landscape is in a process of flux. I explore a set of tensions; between stillness and apprehension, a collapsing of time, place and history, familiarity and strangeness. Coupled with these ideas, my work is an exploration of the conflict between the rational and the emotional, and the difficulty in separating one from the other. I have always been uncomfortable with the idea of ‘putting the viewer in a certain situation’ or ‘making the viewer feel this or that’. Also, I don’t see ‘the viewer’ as a single entity. I hope my work can offer a kind of slowing down, and reflection.
10.01.2012 A. What is for you the line of ‘Waypoint’?
A.H. The black line painted across the canvas and onto the wall attempts to fix a mark behind which the image seems to slip. A fragment of stormy cloud acts as backdrop that the oily fluidity of the paint seeks to liquidate. The wavering imperfection of the line only acts to fix its own inherent failure as it tries to determine a waypoint between the temporal and the perpetual. By definition, a waypoint can be a destination, a fix along a planned course used to make a journey, or a point of reference useful for navigation. Traditionally waypoints have been associated with distinctive features of the earth, such as rock formations, springs, oases, mountains, buildings, roadways, waterways and railways. These associations still persist, but waypoints are increasingly associated with navigational technology such as satellites, radio beacons, buoys and control points. Waypoints are becoming increasingly abstract, often having no obvious relationship to any distinctive features on the Earth’s surface. “Highways in the sky”, created for air navigation, often have no clear connection to features of the real world, and consist only of a series of abstract waypoints in the sky through which pilots navigate.
A.: ARTERICAMBI
A.H.: ANNA HUGHES
23.12.2011
3.01.2012
A. From your painting emerges a kind of harmonic disagreement, starting from the use of colour which borders between neo-romantic visions and digital abstractions. How do you think that the language of the electronic elaboration has influenced the language of contemporary art and in particular of the painting? A.H. In face of the endless stream of digital and electronic information, questions arise about the relationship between order and disorder, stability and instability. What happens when an image breaks up or when the signal is lost? What are the resonances that extend elsewhere, beyond the parameters of the framed images? What remains in the memory or the subconscious and what is discarded, what slips? What is left? Painting persists as an interrogatory visual language that seeks something beyond the image and addresses what we cannot see, before we can see, before and after language (words). As image breaks down and meanings falter into a chaotic mist of white noise, painting is perhaps a process of navigation.
23.12.2011
3.01.2012
A. From your painting emerges a kind of harmonic disagreement, starting from the use of colour which borders between neo-romantic visions and digital abstractions. How do you think that the language of the electronic elaboration has influenced the language of contemporary art and in particular of the painting? A.H. In face of the endless stream of digital and electronic information, questions arise about the relationship between order and disorder, stability and instability. What happens when an image breaks up or when the signal is lost? What are the resonances that extend elsewhere, beyond the parameters of the framed images? What remains in the memory or the subconscious and what is discarded, what slips? What is left? Painting persists as an interrogatory visual language that seeks something beyond the image and addresses what we cannot see, before we can see, before and after language (words). As image breaks down and meanings falter into a chaotic mist of white noise, painting is perhaps a process of navigation.
10.01.2012 A. What is for you the line of ‘Waypoint’?
A.H. The black line painted across the canvas and onto the wall attempts to fix a mark behind which the image seems to slip. A fragment of stormy cloud acts as backdrop that the oily fluidity of the paint seeks to liquidate. The wavering imperfection of the line only acts to fix its own inherent failure as it tries to determine a waypoint between the temporal and the perpetual. By definition, a waypoint can be a destination, a fix along a planned course used to make a journey, or a point of reference useful for navigation. Traditionally waypoints have been associated with distinctive features of the earth, such as rock formations, springs, oases, mountains, buildings, roadways, waterways and railways. These associations still persist, but waypoints are increasingly associated with navigational technology such as satellites, radio beacons, buoys and control points. Waypoints are becoming increasingly abstract, often having no obvious relationship to any distinctive features on the Earth’s surface. “Highways in the sky”, created for air navigation, often have no clear connection to features of the real world, and consist only of a series of abstract waypoints in the sky through which pilots navigate.
A.: ARTERICAMBI
A.H.: ANNA HUGHES
18.01.2012 A. In this work the painting reaches/extends beyond the canvas, almost becoming an installation. Do you think that hybridization between different artistic techniques and practices is a survival strategy of traditional art or a new way to achieve an higher artistic level and express the quality' of the greatness (physical,moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic,spiritual, artistic) typical of the "sublime"?
A.H. I hadn’t thought of it as an installation before but I guess it could be seen like that. Painting the line across the painting and onto the wall was a spontaneous action. I painted the fragment of falling cloud first and then looking at it, and thinking about it, the idea of the line came next, directly projected form my subconscious. As soon as I began to see it in my mind, the more the necessity of it to this painting seemed to grow. I needed to see what what kind of transformation would take place. So in this particlular piece there was no preconceived idea to make an installation. It was more of a private happening in the studio. (hahhaha) Sometimes it happens the other way around. I think the second idea you suggest comes closer to describing how the desire to express something can be channelled through different mediums. And finding the most efficient way of expressing the idea and being free to do that is important. It’s not really new though, as artists have been doing this throughout the 20th and 21st Centuries. I wonder what new mediums will come next? What will happen when video is declared dead? Maybe there will be a lot of video art about video art or performance about performance. This is probably already going on! I think performance is very interesting at the moment. The temporality of it is very important. Because it is a happening, it is unstable and volatile in a way which is very exciting and in these times when everything is consumable, performance art is something that evades this.
24.01.2012
A. The rhythm of our conversation, is marked by a free timeline. Questions and answers follow each other without a specific pattern favoring the daily evolution of our day. You are now engaged in the making up of new paintings to be exhibited at Artericambi. What are you working on now?
I am currently reading ‘The Roots of Romantisicm’ by Isiah Berlin. It’s interesting to see how romantisicm in art and literature emerged from the enlightenment as an emotional reaction to a new predominant insistance of scientific rules of order and logic, also at the time of huge industrial revolutions and changes when there was a huge sense of loss for a certain way of life and in particular the changes upon the countryside. J.F Lyotard’s theory of the sublime looks at how in the experience of modern life, globalized communications technologies have given rise to a perception of the everyday as de-stabilizing and excessive. He describes how the sublime experience is fundamentally transformative and about the relationship between order and disorder, and the disruption of the stable co-ordinates of time and space. The sublime describes a moment when thought comes to an end and we encounter something which is ‘other’.
Your paintings evoke a feeling of “uncanny”, as it has been defined by Freud. The landscapes are pleasant, peaceful and familiar, but they summon up a kind of anxiety. They are like a dream that is going to turn in a nightmare. The beholder feels a kind of uneasiness as the innocent beauty of the scene was hiding a mystery. It’s like you want the public to make a specific experience that affects his emotions. Is it important for you to put the spectator in this specific emotional situation and experience? Ideas of loss, separation, uncertainty and temporality are key to my work. I have been focusing on the qualities of the paint as an equivalent to the metaphysical and psychological states of groundlessness and to convey atmospheres of transition and of instability. Varnishes and glazes coupled with the fluidity of paint help to convey a sense that the very structure of the landscape is in a process of flux. I explore a set of tensions; between stillness and apprehension, a collapsing of time, place and history, familiarity and strangeness. Coupled with these ideas, my work is an exploration of the conflict between the rational and the emotional, and the difficulty in separating one from the other. I have always been uncomfortable with the idea of ‘putting the viewer in a certain situation’ or ‘making the viewer feel this or that’. Also, I don’t see ‘the viewer’ as a single entity. I hope my work can offer a kind of slowing down, and reflection.
25.01.2012
Painting had been considered a dead medium since the late 60s and 70s. At that time artists were engaged in a criticism of representation: they wanted to emancipate art from the traditional role of imitating nature and expressing feelings. Then painting come back as a way of reconsidering tradition and of playing with history in a creative way. While it was criticizing the false pretentions of originality, postmodern painting decided that it was time to assume that art is nothing but elaboration of preexisting signs and that it is not possible to reach any deeper or higher truth. Why are you using painting today? It’s is a false statement to say that painting has been considered a dead medium since the 60’s and 70’s. This was an opinion held by a certain set of people at a certain time and it would be a big generalization to cast across the whole spectrum of what was going on at that time and what has happened since. The history of art is endangered if it puts too much weight on what was happening in one place and ignores what might have been happening in another. It’s important take heed of the bias that has swung from one genre to another depending on the particular interests or opinions of the favoured art critics or theorists of the moment. These things have always been mutually perpetuated by the art markets, and by the political and economic influences of the time. There is and always will be a multiplicity of movements at any one time. Art should be about seeking after some kind of truth, to reveal and interrogate things about the world around us in order for transformation to take place. Painting has never ceased to be a medium that fascinates both artists and their audiences, and to be able to reinvent itself and it’s possibilities for expression continuously, from ideas about it’s form, and the medium itself, to its position in the history of art, to a political tool of expression, to a subject of contention which many conceptual artists reference.
In his the theory of “dialectical images”, Walter Benjamin thought that any present is connected with a specific period of the past and that images from this past are close to the new sensibility. Do you think that our present is contemporary of romantic way of feeling? Romanticism seems to continually re-ermerge in every generation, apperaing in many different forms. In the last 50 years we’ve seen widely acknowledged examples such as the St.Ives artists in the 50’s, then the hippy movements in the 60’s and 70’s, the new romantics of the 1980’s, the mysical cults of the 1990’s. It’s always easier to look back in retrospect to see these waves and how romantic temperaments have always rejected and often sought extreme alternatives to the world around them, almost always in reaction to the political situation of the time. One among many counter reactions to ‘modern life’, was the appearance of the Neo Romantic movement in British Art, a collective project than began after the 2ndWW, primarily concerned with an intensely heightened identification with nature. Their work tells of a turn away from thier society in search for spiritual or moral values behind or through the appearance of nature.
A.H. In my new work, a romantic style is put on edge by a sense of acute anxiety. The paint is thin, and stained in layers onto the fabric in calm, pale tones that make an unsettling contrast with a kind of latent sense of instability in the imagery that wavers between apocalyptic and mythological. New elements have come into the work. Before I was overlaying painted geometric elements over a background. This time, I've begun to stitch thread into strict patterns made up of squares and triangles, onto the canvas before applying the paint. For the first time in my work, some canvasses are stripped bare of imagery and take on a clean rationalized sythnthesis of my ideas in abstract form in stitched pattern. I've been thinking about the struggle between rational and emotional thought processes, the romantic and the apocalyptic, and a sense of everything being on the brink of collapse. Titles such as ‘squadron’, ‘fallout’ and ‘lights out’ bring suggestions of war, while the small stitched elements draw assosiations with aircraft, spaceships, pixels, targets, stars, and waypoints, yet at the same time represent none of the above in any kind of figurative way.
Anna Hughes Born in London, 1982. Lives and works in Berlin
Education 2001-2004 Bachelor of Art, Visual Arts, Goldsmiths College, University of London Solo Shows 2012 'Waypoint', Artericambi, Verona, Italy 2011 'A division in time no less than a division in matter', Bianca galleri, Palermo, Italy 2010 ‘Some Velvet Morning’, Galerie Birgit Ostermeier, Berlin Group Shows 2012 studiolo project, Spazio Cabinet, Milan 'At Home with Portable Isolation Unit', Interno4, Bologna, Italy 2011 ‘The painter, the draughtsman, the dealer and their lovers’,Voges gallery, Frankfurt am Main. ‘A Happy Life in the Mountains’ with Portable Isolation Unit, Skalitzerstrasse 100, Berlin ‘A Happy Life in the Mountains part 2’, with Portable Isolation Unit Elfes Monumental Masons, London E1 ‘About Abstraction’ , KTV, Berlin ,‘Paradies’, WENDT + FRIEDMANN gallery, Berlin 2010 ‘Nouvelle traduction: Ins Blickfield gerückt’, Institut Français, Berlin. 2008 'Everbody Knows This is Nowhere', Wendt + Friedmann Galerie, Berlin Arfairs Art First, Bologna 2012 with Bianca galeri Volta, 2011, Basel with Galerie Voges Arco, Madrid, 2010 with Galerie Birgit Ostermeier Art Brussels, 2009 & 2010, with Galerie Birgit Ostermeier
Residencies ‘Interno4’, Bologna, Italy, with Portable Isolation Unit, 2012 'Copenhagen Place', London, UK, 2012 http://copenhagenplace.com/ Projects 2011- current date Portable Isolation Unit www.portableisolationunit.com Website anna-hughes.com Publications ‘A Happy Life in the Mountains’, hand bound, riso printed catalogue for the Artist collective Portable isolation Unit, 2011 ‘Teller’ Issue 2, published by Teller, Uk, 2011,http://tellermagazine.com/ ‘Anachronisms and Interferences’ limited edited of 150 published by Catherdral, Switzerland,2009 - www.read-cathedral.ch Private Collections Sammlung Sør Rusche Stephan Landwehr, Grill Royal, Berlin and other private collections in Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany.
ANNA HUGHES | WAYPOINT
Anna Hughes | Waypoint opening 25.02.2012 at 6.00 p.m. 28.02.2012 - 14.04.2012