SELECTED WORKS BY David Batchelor
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David Batchelor
Brick Lane Remix I
2003
Shelving Units, found light boxes, fluorescent light, vinyl, acrylic sheet, cable, plugboards
Dimensions variable |
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Through his artwork and writing, David Batchelor explores the concept of colour as a unique phenomenon: how colour’s omnipresence in everyday experience transcends function and aesthetics to create its own symbolic orders. Using second-hand light-boxes and shelving units, Batchelor’s Brick Lane Remix 1 is part of a series of work exploring how colour and culture are inextricably entwined. Grouping together a collection of electric signs found in the Banglatown area of London, Batchelor’s installation perfectly captures the gritty and exotic aura of Brick Lane, a shady side street notorious for prostitution, Jack the Ripper, and more recently, curry houses. Framing these cultural references as minimalist screens of neon hues, Batchelor creates a form of visual literature, isolating the essence of locality and contemporary legend. |
David Batchelor
Parapillar 7 (Multicolour)
2006
Steel support with plastic, metal, rubber, painted wood and feather objects
267 x 78 x 78 cm |
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ARTIST INFORMATION
ARTICLES
The Horrible Hues
By Joe Fyfe
In David Batchelor's rented garage in north London, one wall is filled with his photographs of signs and billboards that have been painted or papered over with a single color. He calls them "found monochromes."
Arrayed on the studio floor are his sculptures, witty "color wagons" made from iron shipping trolleys that he has found on the street. They are also monochromes, fitted with brilliantly colored plastic sheets -- vibrant limes, burgundies and ultramarines.
Batchelor's lively work telegraphs the notion that color is always making itself known in our environment and that it can transport us. Batchelor, who is an artist who also teaches critical theory, has now written a book about color that is, um, brilliant.
Chromophobia is a long meditation on color in western culture. Batchelor claims that color doesn't fit in with any of our social constructs. It's too immoral, unnamable, seductive, foreign, elusive.
Like his work, the book is clever and unpretentious, and ranges through the ages, combining references from classical philosophy ("A painter is just a grinder and mixer of multicolor drugs" -- Plato), film (especially The Wizard of Oz) and literature, even the Bible ("Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow"). Sometimes, he mixes it all up, as when he notes that "Dorothy's Kansas, as we know, is gray: Huxley's Kansas is language, as language grays the world around us."
Read the entire article here
Source: www.artnet.com
David Batchelor: ikon gallery By Caoimbin Mac Giolla Leith
The title of David Batchelor's first major solo show at a public institution, "Shiny-Dirty," neatly encapsulated the beat-up brilliance of his trademark stacks of reconditioned light boxes and fleets of low-slung, four-wheeled monochromes. Expanding on this title, the artist's description of his work in a catalogue interview as "dirty readymades for shiny monochromes" signaled a conscious engagement with two of twentieth-century art's most significant forms. Batchelor's work is informed, though by no means governed by, his writings on the theory and cultural history of color. "Chromophobia I-IV," 2000, for example, a series of photographs of a roughed-up toy panda in a garish clown costume languishing on a sidewalk, was made the same year as the artist's justly celebrated book, whose title it borrows. Yet his work's consistent emphasis on accident and experiment, its embrace of the casual and the contingent, effectively distances it from the dictates of programmatic critical inquiry.
Read the entire article here
Source: www.findarticles.com
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