Sorcha Dallas

Sorcha Dallas at The Armory Show New York - Pier 94 /Booth 706

with Henry Coombes and Michael Stumpf

Private View: Wednesday 4th March 12-8pm. Opening Hours: Thursday 5th - Saturday 7th, 12-8pm, Sunday 8th 12-7pm

Coombes was born in London in 1977 and completed his BA at Glasgow School of Art in 2002. Since then he has had solo shows at Anna Helwing, LA, The Cooper Gallery, Dundee, and Suzie Q Project Space, Zurich. Group shows include Broadway 1602, New York, and The Zabludowicz Collection Project Space, London. Coombes was a recipient of the 2005 Scottish Arts Council/Scottish Screen Film award and his short film, ‘Laddy and the Lady’, was premiered at the Tramway, Glasgow in June 2006. It has since screened at film festivals in Oberhausen, Norway, Edinburgh, Stockholm and Nova Scotia. He represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and exhibited at the Hammer Museum, LA in June 2008. This year will see the screening of his fourth short film, ‘The Bedfords’, which was made possible through a Creative Scotland Award. The film debuts at Lights and Sie, Dallas, in April with the support of the Michael Goss Foundation and will be shown later in the year at Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow and the Zabludowicz Project Space, London.

Henry Coombes’s work is concerned with investigating the entrenched political, cultural and class connotation of the traditional media in which he works. Oil paint and watercolour are used to seduce the viewer into familiar and wholesome images, which on closer inspection reveal a dark and subversive subtext.

Born in Mannheim, Germany in 1969, Stumpf gained a Diploma from the State Academy of Fine Art, Karlsruhe (2001) and an MFA from Glasgow School of Art (2004). He served as a committee member of Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, and was co-founder and curator of kaiserpassage, Karlsruhe. Recent exhibitions include Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago; SAMSA, Berlin; Plan 9, Bristol and Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow. This year he was awarded with a Glenfiddich residency at the Banff Institute in Canada.

Stumpf’s lovingly-made mixed-media objects, installations and text-based works possess an engaging cryptic quality, an aspect of the power of visual art to assert its resemblance to linguistic form. In this case, the throttling ciphers of vine, noose, chain, and rope – as well as dangling urban Pandora’s-boxes – possess a morbid syntax; what Rosalind Krauss might call ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Forest’ for its pungent element of Germanic gothic. Filtered through these dark collisions of nature and culture and a contemporary affinity for day-to-day materials is a persistent yearning for imaginative autonomy, as when the inanimate articles of folklore assume a life apart from their creator’s Ovidian whims.