Binnen/Buiten

I installed two series of Reflective Editors, a Blind Screen, a specifically constructed light box showing a series of graphic works (which presented the grid ratios and formats used across my visual vocabulary integrating the art work with its underlying research process) and a video installation ‘Fast Surface‘; a looped photographic series. I also showed a new series of paper works.

The large Reflective Editor installations formed a series of 3 on the ground floor and another series of two upstairs shared with the new framed cut paper pieces.

Continuing my concern with reflection, vision and repetition I also developed a wholly new set of works featuring a vertical format. This location aditionally prompted me to investigate some of the similarities and differences between my own work and that of Mondrian, in particular our contrasting concepts of abstraction but where both work on the border between ‘pure’ visuality and a quasi-autonomous formal language.

The particular challenge here was to develop a series of themes in a very complex architectural space. I chose to approach the installation as a number of distinct but interacting spaces. The video projection room involved creating a distinct environment but equally carefully planned and installed.

Douglas Allsop

Research Interests

Minimalism. Conceptual Art. Konkrete Kunst

Current Research

1. My practice is concerned with the nature of perception and of illusion, ways of seeing i.e. what we want to see, why we see what we see, what we don't see, what sees us, etc. I have written: Of what we look at
Of what looks at us
Of what looking blinds us to

2. Work in the studio is a drawing/design/photography based activity which includes small scale maquette or model making.

Each of my exhibitions is treated as a new 'architectural' work responding directly to, and transforming a particular space and each involves extensive, highly detailed research and planning. The notes and exhibition plan is always retained by me in the form of a research portfolio. I work from within the minimalist/formalist tradition but expand the concept of sculptural space through serialism and optics. Thus the space I research is simultaneously real and imaginary; visual but not always accessible. My Reflective works are both editors and objects: one looks through them (to the wall behind), but also at them as both a mirror and a grid and the viewer is encouraged to connect each work as a serial development of the grids themselves.

The 'machine aesthetic' of each work is matched by technical rigour in their installation and by a mathematical integrity of grid ratios across each series.

• http://www.mondriaanhuis.nl/