Solo exhibition

I was invited to exhibit work of my selection as part of Tate Britain’s Art Now programme, a series which provides a platform for new art in an internationally renowned gallery. Past exhibitors in the same programme have included Matthew Barney, Tacita Dean and Thomas Demand. Mine was the second in a series that sought to change the profile of this strand of the programme and make it even more responsive to recent art; the first artist to exhibit in this series was Turner Prize nominee Mark Titchner, and my exhibition ran concurrently with a sculpture in the forecourt by Roger Hiorns. I chose to exhibit a small group of works that included a very large trompe-l’oeil wall painting, ‘Giant torn tape figure (grey)’, a very small wall-based sculpture that mimicked freshly-squeezed paint, ‘Painted form no.2’, a graphite drawing of clay scraps entitled simply ‘Drawing’, and a painted aluminium floor work that resembled torn paper fragments forming a figure, ‘Paper golem’. These made use of the specific qualities of the Art Now space while remaining particular to my concern with exploring the complexities of material presence through extremes of reduction and simplification. The exhibition received considerable critical attention in the national press (Guardian, Times and Independent), and was accompanied by a critical text by curator Katherine Stout which appeared in the catalogue documenting the year’s programme. ‘Drawing’ was acquired by the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art for its permanent collection, and ‘Paper golem’ was purchased by Lawrence Luhring, co-director of Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York.