Exhibitions

Venue: The Drawing Room, Tannery Arts, London

Dates: 2005

Notes: touring

This revelatory exhibition is curated by David Musgrave, one of the leading figures within an emerging generation of British artists. It presents new work by Musgrave and that of his contemporaries in juxtaposition with a 19th Century lithograph by Georg Scharf and a drawing by Yves Tanguy.

Waster Material is an exhibition about time, matter and the imaginary. Hannah Greely’s ‘Assembly’, a papier-mache stepladder which is home to numerous handmade insects, implies a future world from which human beings have been erased. At the opposite end of the time-line is Georg Scharf’s Duria antiquior (A more ancient Dorset), a print made after a drawing by the geologist Henry De la Beche based on fossil evidence of prehistoric life, which offers a complementary impossible perspective.

A degree of material and pictorial instability characterises the other work in the show. Rupert Norfolk’s ‘leaf’ sculpture is in a state of fixed indeterminacy, being at once recognisable and not quite legible, and this has something in common with Yves Tanguy’s shifting but precisely rendered, other-worldly forms. William Daniel’s paintings are derived from paper tableaux that echo romantic and religious paintings of the past; they are at once frail and graphically precise. Clare Stephenson’s drawings take as their staring point constructions she has made from art historical reproductions, scraps of wood and wire. The results are unpredictable mutations, worlds in themselves that also initiate a peculiar dialogue with their origins. Both the drawings and the sculpture by David Musgrave take as their point of origin a small piece of material that has been reproduced in a way that stresses its potentially figurative characteristics.

David Musgrave lives and works in London. Solo exhibitions include, art now, Tate Britain (2003), transmission, Glasgow (2002), greengrassi, London (2004, 2001 and 200), Duncan Cargill Gallery, London (1998). Group exhibitions include Arnolfini, Bristol (2003), Hannah Greely lives and works in Los Angeles and has not previously exhibited in London. William Daniels and Rupert Norfolk live and work in London. Clare Stephenson is based in Glasgow.