Gordon Shrigley, Acroterion (detail), 2014, chalk on painted board
Gordon Shrigley | Heaven’s Gate
17 October – 15 November 2014
Preview: Thursday 16 October 6 – 9pm
First Thursday late opening: 6 November until 9pm
Opening times: Thursday – Sunday 12 – 6pm or by appointment
Heaven’s Gate is an exhibition of all new work by the artist Gordon Shrigley.
I’ve watched the stars fall silent on a series of chalked black monoliths, at once transient and solid, the notion of all, of origins, and of how language has enabled us to think. Minimalistic and repetitive constructions, they evoke discipline and labour, line as a death machine, the last drawing before it is recycled, refurbished, started over. Shrigley is looking for answers from beyond the horizon.
Shrigley makes the last drawing thinking about whatever the post-human condition will be, what form of consciousness lies beyond thinking as distinction. There is an embracing of fatalism here or, in his own words, “this is drawing, from beginning to end, […] a kind of tortured, messianic Zilch,” and is the continuation of a series buried earlier this year in a time capsule by the Eddie the Eagle Museum, Amsterdam. He knows that it is only while we are in these bodies that we can learn the lessons needed to complete our own individual transition.
Gordon Shrigley (b.1964, Wiltshire, UK) studied at Bournville College of Art, Birmingham; the University of Westminster and the Slade School of Fine Art, London. He has exhibited in the UK and abroad including Fruehsorge Contemporary Drawings, Berlin; the Centre for Contemporary Art, Sacramento; the Musée dʼart Moderne, Saint-Etienne and the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart. He was selected for an artist’s residency at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart in 1998 and at Hospitalfield House, Arbroath in 2000. His work can be found in the Staatsgalerie Drawing and Print Collection, Stuttgart; Academy Schloss Solitude Archive Collection, Stuttgart; Musée dʼart Moderne, Saint-Etienne and the Ludwigsburg State Archives, Germany.
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