Ewan Gibbs and David Shrigley
15 April - 7 May 2000
Ewan Gibbs and David Shrigley offer contrasting extrapolations of what drawing can be given over to. David Shrigley for sometime has made drawings and photographs with a casual but studious strangeness, outlining a world with a sort of absurd logical positivism, obscurely annotating them with sardonic observation. Though, wearing the guise of a child like naivete, much of the work functions in identifying bizarre truisms in seemingly straight forward contexts and alternately, finding straight forward truisms in the most dotty of constructs. Following a sort of manifesto of illogicality and new experience. The resultant exotically, mundane worlds operate by isolating the conditions and mechanics of a language of rationale, non-sequiturs and misnomers. Leaving a kind of portraiture by way of fantasy. He was recently short listed for the Beck's Futures prize and his work is currently on show at the ICA.
Ewan Gibbs' work on the other hand is the product of a meticulous approach to visual structure and composition. Assiduously building up an image from the core elements of mark making. Built into the grid of a sheet of graph paper Gibbs' drawings dismantle the process of optical acuity and naturalism, whereas Shrigley intercedes and plays on the concepts behind images. Gibbs' work is both meditational and obsessive, and negotiates the contrast between their punctilious nature and banal subject matter into a catchall of intrigue and hand made ingenuity. As has always been the case, the source of imagery is that of the holiday brochure and has gradually accumulated into an archive of differing scenes and subtle nuances of finesse. Ewan Gibbs recently finished his first solo show in New York at the Paul Morris Gallery.
