Handel Street Projects

Farmers' Market, First Floor, 72 Wigmore Street, London W1, 2008
‘..a farmers’ market every weekend, in every shopping area in London’, is the proposal of a new report being launched by former Deputy Mayor of London, Jenny Jones. The report ‘Farmers’ Markets – building bridges between farmers and London shoppers’, finds that there is surging demand for farmers markets amongst Londoners. Farmers’ markets are the urban shop windows to the countryside. Following the spirit of the Deputy Mayor, Handel Street Projects is very pleased to announce its own annual Farmers’ Market...

The Reading Room, John Plowman, 29 Thurloe Place, London SW7, 2008
Handel Street Projects is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by John Plowman. The objects that Plowman has been making recently are the outcomes of performances in which the private act of reading is made public, as the book is read the pages are torn and re-stacked within a plywood structure...

Kalemegdan Bridge Collaboration with Richard Deacon and Mrdjan Bajic, 2008 to 2010
Handel Street Projects in association with Beacon is pleased to announce The Kalmegdan Bridge Collaboration between British sculptor, Richard Deacon and Serbian sculptor, Mrdjan Bajic. Coming together in Belgrade in July and September of this year they will work on the design of a new footbridge in Belgrade...

1-5 Exhibition Road, London, 2008
Works by Olivier Richon, Stefan Sehler and Gerard Williams. Photographer, painter and sculptor, they share an interest in the illusion of what is ‘behind’ the physical object in terms of meaning...

Sequences, Chain Gallery, London, 2006
'Sequences' was an exhibition held at Chain Gallery, a temporary project space on Brompton road, featuring shows and events throughout the summer of 2006...

St George's Chapel, Bloomsbury, London, April 2005
The chapel was built in 1806 to serve the last of Nicolas Hawksmore’s churches...

medievalmodern, London, 2002-2005
Medievalmodern was a project space in London’s Marylebone that opened in 2002, which aimed to stimulate a dialogue between medieval and contemporary art...

Medieval Modern
Medieval Modern was a project space in London’s Marylebone that opened in 2002, which aimed to stimulate a dialogue between medieval and contemporary art. We would invite artists to produce work which resonate with and sometimes incorporate medieval pieces. Through this project we aimed to raise a variety of issues ranging from traditional art historical concerns about provenance, museum and exhibition spaces and the decontextualising of the image to more recent issues such as institutional critique, physical and ideological influences of the exhibition site, relation of original to copy, psychological aspects of collecting, the desire of the private collector to assemble and organise, and exploring different aspects of art making and collecting.

The shows have all been enthusiastically received attracting press coverage, reviews and a large public attendance at the gallery. Shows included:

St George’s Chapel, Bloomsbury, April 2005
The chapel was built in 1806 to serve the last of Nicolas Hawksmore’s churches, St George’s in Bloomsbury. We used this space for an installation by Mary Anne Francis ‘Bloomsbury Blooms' which used various cleaning utensils to create a magnificent flower arrangement and Lucy Heyward’s ‘Voices’ using archival recordings of people living and working in the area played simultaneously from 6 CD players.

Sequences, Chain Gallery, London, 2006
'Sequences' was an exhibition held at Chain Gallery, a temporary project space on Brompton road, featuring shows and events throughout the summer of 2006, kindly supported by Brompton Estates. The show was curated in collaboration with Design Products and Photography at the Royal College of Art and Handel Street Projects, showing work by: Alice Finbow, Martino Gamper, Lucy Heyward, Gabriel Klasmer, Nahoko Kudo, Claude Lelouch, Yve Lomax, Rut Blees Luxemburg, Alexandra McGlynn, Kirk Palmer, Olivier Richon and Hermione Wiltshire. Our part of the show consisted of four digital video installations, exploring the spaces between forms of photography and film.

Works by Olivier Richon, Stefan Sehler and Gerard Williams. Photographer, painter and sculptor, they share an interest in the illusion of what is ‘behind’ the physical object in terms of meaning. Formal elements constantly reoccur and link different bodies of work on a visual level in all three cases. Their work questions aspects of our preconceived ideas about the mediums and materials they each work with.

In Olivier Richon’s photographs velvet is used, partly for its strong light absorbing qualities and painterly feel. The object in his work transcends the symbolic, becoming elusive and hard to pin down. His work is about absence and presence, timelessness opposed to immediacy of photographic medium. It is a meditation on the meaning of photography before relating to the painting itself. Here, he is showing works from his Arcadia series, (referring to the famous Poussin painting) which “reduces the vocabulary of the still life to the baroque figure of the fold”, (Giorgio Verzotti, Artforum, Oct 1992) and The Hunt that “adds to the apparatus of the still life sentences from Plato’s Sophist”. (David Mellor, Porfolio 21).

The starting point for Stefan Sehler’s paintings is photography. At the first glance they appear to be photographs or even photograms, as their surface is hidden behind the perspex to which he reverse applies the mixture of oil, enamel and acrylic paint. His unusual technique makes the surface look suspended within it, distancing itself from the viewer. Motifs of flowers, trees, branches and foliage etc. are not representations as such: they are more about the act of painting itself. These ‘surrogate’ paintings are a play between abstraction and figuration, they use controlled chance where “paint does things it’s own way” as the artist himself says. He adds: “The picture is smarter than the painter”.

In this new group of works, Gerard Williams questions and reinvents an approach developed early in his career. He has devised and repeated a range of essentially decorative, modular, solid turned wooden forms. These are covered with a disparate variety of furnishing fabrics. Located in awkward places on the gallery walls, they make use of juxtaposition in order to suggest an infinite variety of combinations. These objects are hybrids, apparently accidental, incomplete conjunctions. They set up a dynamic that focuses our attention upon what could be called the surface content of decorative pattern and form: behind the apparently superficial inevitably lie deeply embedded cultural values. These objects share the wall surface in a way that connects to the notion of picture plane.

Handel Street Projects would like to thank:
Brompton Estates and the Brompton design project; supporting the partnership between the creative and business sectors. www.bromptondesigndistrict.com

Kalemegdan Bridge Collaboration with Richard Deacon and Mrdjan Bajic, 2008 to 2010

The collaboration will be the first stages of the creation of a major landmark for the City of Belgrade, and would be the first time since the 19th Century that an artist from another country will be involved in the production of a public monument in Belgrade. In 1873 Florentine, Enrico Paci came to Belgrade to start the work on the monument to Prince Mihailo Obrenovic, who ordered the creation of Kalemegdan Park in 1867.

Fedja Klikovac, of Handel Street Projects will curate an exhibition in October 2008 at the Kalemegdan (Belgrade) Fortress, a heritage site, dating back to roman times, adjacent to the proposed site of the bridge. The exhibition will show the outcomes of the two weeks collaboration between Deacon and Bajic and would include a topographical model of the site, model(s) of the bridge design together with associated drawings and other material.

Deacon and Bajic represented Wales and Serbia, respectively at the 2007 Venice Biennale. Richard Deacon has been at the forefront of British sculpture since the seventies. In 1987 he was awarded the Turner Prize and showed in many prestigious art galleries and events around the world including Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Tate Gallery, Museum of Modern Art New York, Biennal de Sao Paulo, Sculptur Projekte in Munster, The Biennale of Sydney, Documenta Kassel etc. Since 1983, he’s been represented and regularly shown at Lisson Gallery, London.

Richard Deacon, Another Mountain 2007, Stainless steel, 290 x 420 x 340 cm, The Lah Collection, Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris, Salzburg

Mrdjan Bajic came to prominence in the eighties Belgrade and since then produced a vast body of work in rather different circumstances: from the lively post Tito Yougoslavia, to the isolated nineties wartime and at present new start for independent Serbia. His work was always embedded in the social practice and its effects, questioning and giving answers to the position of the artist in society. His work has been shown internationally from early in his career including Kunsthalle Wien, The Biennale of Sydney, Ludwig Museum Budapest, Fundacio Miro Barcelona, Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, The National Gallery Prague, Biennal di Sao Paulo etc.

This first stage of the project has been made possible by the grant from The Henry Moore Foundation.

For further information and images please contact:
Lynn Parker info@beaconartproject.com www.beaconartproject.com
Clare Munro info@handelstreetprojects.com www.handelstreetprojects.com

24 July – 16 August 2008
Private View: Wednesday 23 July 18:00 – 20:00
Location: 29 Thurloe Place, London SW7
Opening times: Tuesday – Saturday 12:00 – 18:00

Handel Street Projects is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by John Plowman. The objects that Plowman has been making recently are the outcomes of performances in which the private act of reading is made public, as the book is read the pages are torn and re-stacked within a plywood structure. Using his own library as his source material Plowman has read a set of Encyclopaedia Britannica to produce ‘mis-un-pedia’ and ‘mis-un-library’.

More recently Plowman has been scanning the bookshelves of High Street bookstores and purchasing books to read. ‘Queens English’ is a work in which multiple copies of an English Dictionary have been read and re-stacked on to book shelves. Recently acquired books to be read specifically for this exhibition include a hefty tome entitled ‘30,000 years of Art’ together with a series of dictionaries whose topics include sociology, philosophy and architecture.

For the duration of the exhibition Plowman will be establishing the Thurloe Place Reading Group in which the focus will be on the relationship between artist, audience, and gallery, analogous to that between author, reader and library. Membership of the Reading Group will be open to all and each week will focus on a particular book and members of the group will engage in a collaborative and performative action. Resulting in an accumulative piece of work that will develop over the course of the exhibition

‘Queens English’, 2008; performance during Reading Room exhibition, John Plowman, 2008

John Plowman has exhibited in numerous one person and group exhibitions in this country and abroad most recently earlier this year in ‘Catching the Word’ at the Black and White Gallery, New York. In recent years his interest has been in the temporal aspect of art production in which investigations into the possibility of the site of exhibition also being the site of production have been fore fronted. With a particular focus on the question of who bears witness to this activity of production, artist, audience or both. It is his interest in the role of the audience that has informed the development of his curatorial project Beacon which was established in 2004.

The Thurloe Place Reading Group will meet at 3 pm every Saturday during the course of the exhibition.

For further information please contact:
Clare Munro 07815 754634 / info@handelsteetprojects.com / www.handelstreetprojects.com

Handel Street Projects would like to thank:
Brompton Estates and the Brompton design project; supporting the partnership between the creative and business sectors.

12 November – 20 December 2008
Private View: Tuesday 11 November 18:00 – 20:00
Location: First Floor, 72 Wigmore Street, London W1
Opening times: Tuesday – Saturday 12:00 – 18:00

‘..a farmers’ market every weekend, in every shopping area in London’, is the proposal of a new report being launched by former Deputy Mayor of London, Jenny Jones. The report ‘Farmers’ Markets – building bridges between farmers and London shoppers’, finds that there is surging demand for farmers markets amongst Londoners. Farmers’ markets are the urban shop windows to the countryside.

From left: 'Resurrection of Alchemists' installation shot, Braco Dimitrijevic, 2006;
'Game Flags', print on textile, Vuk Cosic, 2007

Following the spirit of the Deputy Mayor, Handel Street Projects is very pleased to announce its own annual Farmers’ Market. This event brings together products from twenty-four producers, especially gathered in for Farmers’ Market, celebrating the best from a selected range of independents. Indeed, Handel Street Projects is able to offer you unprecedented direct deals with the producer, meaning that you get the freshest produce rushed to the capital at the very best prices.

From left: 'Chop Chop Tales', Loukia Alavanou, double screen digital video projection with sound, 2007;
'En Route', digital video with sound, Lucy Heyward, 2008

Hand picked produce chosen from nine countries will be available. At Farmers’ Market you can be sure of our in depth knowledge of each and every item because of our direct supply line to the producers. All invited participants take personal pride in their individual products and want you to enjoy them. The emphasis will be on freshness, variety and quality as well as value for money, so that you can have complete confidence in what you are buying. If you are not sure about anything that we have selected for Farmers’ Market please ask, the producers will be on hand to answer the most demanding consumer enquiries.

Bob & Roberta Smith reading from his book 'Hijack Reality' at the opening of Farmers’ Market

Bob & Roberta Smith will be reading from his new book Hijack Reality during the private view on the 11th November

For further information please contact Clare Munro 07815 754634
Info@handelsteetprojects.com / www.handelstreetprojects.com

Handel Street Projects would like to thank: Howard de Walden Estates, the Photography Department at Royal College of Art and Roddy Cañas for their kind help and support.