Bureau Gallery in Spinnningfields hosts an exhibition entitled ‘On Physical Work’ from this Friday. The show features new works from Italian artist Assunta Ruocco and Greek artist Evangelia Spiliopoulou who have both recently developed practices that are reliant on external and self-imposed systems and structures. Their work in this exhibition deals with process, repetition and time, and in dealing with manual labour, allows it to posit the artist as ‘worker’. Ruocco’s work is full of the rigid organisation of a passion and an inclination to acknowledge a situation. Her own practice over the years has focused on the absence of a studio as a constraint on her creating her work. The exhibition will see her double-sided paintings be displayed or erected as if building blocks that can be used to construct a screen-like piece of art and a shelter. Spiliopoulou, meanwhile, has developed practices that both frees and restricts her in the act of making – using self-imposed limitations or parameters that explore process and the creation of a personal ‘detachment’ from the production of the image. Her aim is to be freed from a ‘classical’ style through the traditional methods of drawing practice, which involves rules regarding shapes, light and shadow, perspective and sense of balance. Her work displays information about time, space and human presence. This show brings together two artists who share an interest in how to define an artist’s labour and evidently why they do it. They use Samual Beckett’s Molloy through the motif of the circle, due to his endless repetition and through the motif represents immortality, infinity or wholeness.
Fri 25 Oct – Fri 29 Nov, Bureau Gallery, 3 Hardman Square, Spinningfields, M3 3EB, Opens Mon – Fri 8am – 6pm (during Exhibitions), or by appointment. www.bureaugallery.com
Image: Detail from Vertical Studio, Assunta Ruocco, 2013
- Words:
- Steven Brown
- Published on:
- Fri 25 Oct 2013
