‘Beta Version 2.0 looks at the contemporary art exhibition as a temporary collection, with work that addresses the transience or otherwise of current practice, and explores the relationship between collection and curation, in particular the roles played by artist, curator and audience in creating work for display.’

www.a-n.co.uk/media/1946802 >>

Featuring Angus Pryor:

Angus Pryor is having a good time having a bad time, or having a bad time having a good time? His diptych ‘God and Man’ has the possibilities of both. Maybe it’s a tidal process. A painting that does not want to stop, in this relatively small gallery, it is surprisingly unobtrusive given its size – 2.4m x 4.8m. This is a graffiti-wall of a painting combined with recycling centre. A mass of detail, minus details, its imagery in the form of, well it’s hard to see – not despite the fact, but because it is all there in front of you. What appear to be the upper halves of plastic objects such as a mice, plastic toy bats, small masks, are held to the canvas by thick paint which has been poured over them in the manner of a small child delightedly icing a bun. Mouse and bun just about survive. Dobs and blobs, chocolate icing in spiral form. Elsewhere, the image of a bird, as it were, impacted in flight onto the painting, and futher on, a real feather. Houses, lanterns, Stars of David, a bit of fluffy material ‘collected’ by the paint when wet. The visceral pleasure in surface and ooze is not completely sure of itself. Abjection is just around the corner.

19 January – 10 March 2012