Sorcha Dallas

Rob Churm: Churm was born In Epping Forest in 1979 and graduated with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Glasgow School of Art in 2001. Recent exhibitions include, group shows at Whitechapel Project Space, London, The Changing Room, Stirling, and Alt Gallery, Newcastle, and a solo at Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow. Churm lives and works in Glasgow.

Rob Churm’s monochromatic drawings are composed with equal parts energy and discipline: densely worked cross-hatching and detailed expressionistic forms are anchored by blank space and crisp graphics. The scenes detailed by his pen are various and often surreal: a giant rose crying in the rain, a Japanese symbol being interrogated under a bare bulb, the words ‘lightning bolt’ buoyed up by a knitted Op Art cloud. Most of all, Churm’s work reverberates with the night atmospheres of the Glasgow bars and clubs where he plays a three stringed guitar and sings in an inimitable style for ‘No Wave’ band Park Attack.

Raphael Danke: Danke was born in 1972 and graduated from the Kunsthochschule, Berlin in 1999. Since then he has exhibited at Galerie Kamm, Berlin, Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow, Adamski, Aachen, Vilma Gold, London and Sandra Burgel, Berlin. He lives and works in Berlin.

Although the legacy of Surrealism is everywhere traceable in the collages, photography and sculptures of Raphael Danke, he wittily re-envisages that legacy in the context of the society of the spectacle. The romanticised or sadistically envisaged muse that haunted the most famous works of the Surrealist movement is displaced in Danke’s enquiries.

Alan Michael: Born in Glasgow in 1967, Alan Michael gained a BA in Fine Art from Duncan of Jordanstone College, Dundee in 1996 and an MA (Fine Art) from Glasgow School of Art in 1998. Recent exhibitions include Tate Triennial, London, David Kordansky, LA, The Showroom, London, Galerie Guido W. Baudach, Berlin and Modern Art, London. Future group shows include ‘Legend’ at Domain de Chamarande (nr Paris) and the Print Studio, Glasgow.

Executed in oil and acrylic on canvas, Michael’s paintings form a skewed but precise idiolect of cultural references. Photographs, prints and art-world reproductions are meticulously studied and fascistically transformed – duplicated, rotated, spliced and inter-married. His iconic hybrids encompassing Lucian Freud, Horst, Balthus, Andrew Wyeth and – more recently – Lynne Ramsey’s film Morvern Callar are doppelgangers of both hegemonic and sub-cultures, middlebrows and avant-gardes.

Craig Mulholland: Craig Mulholland was born in Glasgow in 1969. He studied Drawing and Painting at Glasgow School of Art, graduating in 1991. Recent exhibitions include ‘Grandes et Petites Machines’, Sorcha Dallas/Glasgow School of Art touring to Spike Island, Bristol, 2008; ‘Hyperinflation’, Tate Lightbox, London; and ‘Bearer on Demand’, Transmission Gallery, Glasgow. Mulholland was a recent recipient of the Scottish Arts Council/Scottish Screen Artists Film and Video Award. Mulholland lives and works in Glasgow.

The dominant concerns within Mulholland’s recent work have centred on Foucauldian theories of power - ‘the political dream of the plague […] the penetration of regulation into even the smallest details of everyday life’. The artist’s ‘anxious impudence towards technological and bureaucratic advance’ simultaneously hints at inherent paradoxes and contradictions within his work, such as his own participation in the neo-liberal culture industry. The thwarting of radicalism by collusion is an enduring interest, obliquely considered throughout Mulholland’s practice. These interests have manifested themselves through a prolific body of work across a range of different media.

Alex Pollard: Born in Brighton in 1977, Pollard graduated with a BA in Painting from Glasgow School of Art in 1999 before serving on Glasgow’s Transmission Gallery committee between 2000–2002. Group shows include the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Luhring Augustine, New York, the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peekshill, USA and the Scottish Pavillion at the Venice Biennale in 2005. In 2006 Pollard had solo shows at The Reliance, London and Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow, which was followed by a solo at the Talbot Rice Gallery in 2007.

Pollard deploys the argot in its original sense of a ‘thieves code’ to frame the ‘appropriational’ traditions of post-modernist (and historical) painting, whilst compiling densely enigmatic visual symbols redolent of an underworld polari. His working-method is phoenix -like, reducing his chosen images to an ‘abstract language’ and then reforming them as dissolute fictions. In the past, his ‘argots’ have included Robin Hood, the tools and artefacts of studio practice and the fashion-world-alchemy of Ruby and Millie and Revlon.

Clare Stephenson: Born in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne in 1972, Stephenson graduated with a BA in Sculpture from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee in 1996 before serving on Glasgow’s Transmission Gallery committee. Stephenson has exhibited in group shows in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Stirling, Tyneside, London, Malmö, Madrid, Berlin and Buffalo and in solo shows at Edinburgh’s Talbot Rice Gallery, Dicksmith, London and Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow. Forthcoming projects include a solo show at Linn Luhn, Cologne in 2008.

In Clare Stephenson’s most recent body of work monumentally-scaled collages of drag queens vie for attention, embodying the dialectic between determinism and free will, materialism and decadence. Like much of her work of recent years, Stephenson’s poised, posing drag queens and bandaged heads (ovoid sculptures made of layered shards of white and off-white which appear as something between mirror-forms and clumsy, simplified faces) draw on French literature and art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The ideas and images of Genet, Zola, Huysmans, the Goncourts, Cocteau and Daumier abound, and are played off against one another.

Michael Stumpf: 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 the State Academy of Fine Art, Karlsruhe, The Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, east International, Norwich, Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow, Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago and Spectacle Gallery, Birmingham. Stumpf lives and works in Glasgow.

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.

SUPPORTED BY THE SCOTTISH ARTS COUNCIL, www.scottisharts.org.uk