Press

Toby Paterson curates a show of his contemporaries at the Glasgow Print Studio. Jack Mottram looks at the work shown.

‘Prisms & Shadows’, an exhibition curated by Toby Paterson, fairly fizzes with connections: between individual works, between the 12 exhibiting artists and even between Paterson’s own work and the work on show.

But perhaps ‘curated’ isn’t quite the right word. ‘I don’t feel like the curator of this show,’ Paterson admits. ‘I drew up a list of artists that I was interested in and they gave me what they wanted to give me. There was only one piece of work that I specifically asked for, and I didn’t end up getting it. It was a modest project you could say.’

This free approach has, nonetheless, given rise to an exhibition that feels strongly themed, with the current preoccupations of the Glasgow scene to the fore (though there are artists from outwith the city here, too) and shared enthusiasm among the selected artists for making work that is, loosely speaking, caught between two points, final yet incomplete.

‘There are quite a lot of references to processes,’ Paterson agrees. ‘Whether that’s people using maquettes, or systems to build images and forms with the implication there that something could be pushed a lot further, but with a question there about whether it is necessary to push them further.’

This tendency is clear in Toby Ziegler’s Equivalents for Megaliths, a mysterious assembly of paper polygons, broken crockery and a three-legged horse, all gathered atop a light-box, as if Zeigler is about to return to form his hints and suggestions into a concrete idea. It is there too in Tony Swain’s work on newsprint, a medium that is of the moment, inherently disposable, but here cautiously immortalized by over-painting. Monica Sosnowska’s Maquette for River has literally been caught on its way to completion – it has since been rendered as a full-scale installation – yet in this context, it is among the more polished pieces.

Seen apart, work by Sosnowska, Swain or Zeigler might not appear to have a great deal in common with work by Chris Evans, but his Coptalk – represented by a poster advertising the police recruitment drive he instigated at Amsterdam’s Rietveld Art Academy – is a snug fit in its application of an open-ended process to social, as opposed to formal or art-historical, concerns.

Another red thread is an inclination towards the investigation of spatial relationships. ‘I was interested in artists using these approaches to mess around with scale, or mess around with two and three dimensions,’ Paterson says. ‘There’s Alex Frost’s drawing of a sculpture, where he’s evoked this complex system to represent an object in three dimensions two dimensionally. It’s not a complex shift to make, but it’s a fruitful one.’

Here, Paterson might almost be talking of his own work; the more abstract translations in paint of architectural forms in particular, or the sculptural form he fashioned to display paintings in his last showing at the Modern Institute. And this is where ‘Prisms & Shadows’ takes a peculiar turn: Paterson has chosen not to show his own work, and yet it is ever-present, as if, deliberately or unconsciously, he tackled his curation of the show as he might a new painting.

With such a wealth of work on show, all closely inter-related, but all standing on merit, this last near-uncanny aspect is the icing on the sweetest of cakes. Unmissable stuff.