For the Whitechapel Gallery, Anthea Hamilton and Ciara Phillips have generously created two new silkscreen prints to accompany the exhibition Eduardo Paolozzi, 16 February – 14 May 2017.
Anthea Hamilton - Thirteen Storey Wavey Boot - 2017
The edition uses a motif that recurs regularly in the artist’s work; a two dimensional ‘wavey boot’. Previously manifested in a wide range of material; alabaster, walnut, ceramic, the boot is always at 1:1 scale; a size 6 boot.
Hamilton’s edition, entitled Thirteen Storey Wavey Boot is a proposal drawing for an unlikely apartment building, Made as a silkscreen print, the boot sits in high relief, two dimensional and flat, like many of Hamilton’s sculptures. The image is built from precisely balanced muted colours and glossy details against a background of pure red to give an illusionistic depth that is both vertiginous and seductive.
Medium: Screen print
Size: 89 x 47 cm
Edition of 40
Signed and numbered
Price: £450 (Members £405)
Ciara Phillips - Angled Adult (after Bracelli, for Paolozzi) - 2017
Through the use of over twenty silkscreen layers, Ciara Phillips intended to reflect the intensity of Paolozzi's prints, by creating something that looks as though it might be in progress.
The central figure in the print, a woman riding on a man's back, for Phillips came from thinking about Paolozzi's piece Avant-Garde?!, 1971 in which monsters fill the forms of letters and poke fun at the seriousness attributed to the avant-garde. Phillips relates the humour in that work to another, much earlier figurative alphabet Alfabeto Figurato by Giovanni Battista Bracelli (1632). Phillips has reworked Bracelli’s ‘A’ using this as a recurring motif in the image – ‘A’ for Avant-garde. This edition also reflects on Paolozzi's fascination with the relationship between humans and machines - here the visual language of Photoshop, and the staggering of images are indicative of the machine that has come to occupy our everyday.
Medium: Screen print
Size: 45.8 x 35.8 cm
Edition of 30
Signed and numbered
Price: £450 (Members £405)
These limited editions are available at Whitechapel Gallery