David Batchelor
Unplugged
28 July – 29 September 2007
Talbot Rice Gallery
The University of Edinburgh,
Old College, South Bridge,
Edinburgh EH8 9YL
(+44) 0131 650 2210
info.talbotrice [at] ed.ac.uk
Opening Hours:
Tuesday – Saturday 10am – 5pm Extended Art Festival opening hours:
Monday – Saturday 10am – 5pm
and Sunday 2 – 5pm
Perhaps best known for his light installations and his work on colour theory, artist and author David Batchelor will show a new site specific installation made for Talbot Rice Gallery’s vast atrium space.
Concerned with ideas of urbanism and consumption, Batchelor has scoured the pound shops of East London and the major cities of Scotland to create a multi-coloured forest of plastic and steel. Each component part an object of little value, the colour and material alludes to low status culture and lives lived by economy and thrift. What could be seen as vulgar detritus to some becomes in Batchelor’s hands, jewel like and magical.
Ranging from small, improvised, table-top sculptures, to pillars nearly four metres high, each work consists of a simple found metal support onto which up to five hundred small plastic objects, toys or utensils are attached.
Unlike much of Batchelor’s work of recent years, these are not illuminated. The colour of the work derives from the accumulation of hundreds of cheap, often tiny, plastic or metal elements pegs, clips, combs, brushes, mirrors, cutlery and children’s toys. Some works are organised around a single colour, some are arranged according to the type of object, some relate to a particular use or part of the body.
Unplugged, Batchelor’s equivalent of an acoustic album, continues the artist’s research into the characteristic forms of colour in the city, into the social and cultural spaces where that colour is located.
Batchelor will display, for the first time in a public exhibition, a selection of prints and drawings that inform his ideas. He has also created a new limited edition print commissioned by Talbot Rice Gallery.
David Batchelor was born in Dundee in 1955 and lives and works in London, where he is currently Senior Tutor in Critical Theory in the department of Curating Contemporary Art, at the Royal College of Art.
ARTISTS TALK:
Saturday 11 August 3pm
David Batchelor in conversation with Principal Curator Pat Fisher. A chance to hear more about the themes and ideas behind Batchelor’s new work created for Talbot Rice Gallery. Free but ticketed – booking essential. CALL 0131 662 8740 TO BOOK YOUR TICKET
EXHIBITION SUPPORTED BY THE SCOTTISH ARTS COUNCIL AND WILKINSON GALLERY, LONDON
