Artists Anonymous: Alice’s Apocalypse at Lazarides Gallery

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Visitors to Artists Anonymous’ highly anticipated new exhibition will be invited to immerse themselves into a fantastical universe, step through the mirror and enter Alice’s Apocalyse, opening 6 September until 13 October 2012 at Lazarides Rathbone.

 

Artists Anonymous, a collective group of artists who live and work between London and Berlin focus their multi-disciplinary practice around a combination of painting, photography, performance, installation and video dealing with a broad range of issues including war, famine, sex, drugs, the history of painting and rock ‘n’ roll.

 

In a world where everyone can be famous for 15 minutes and general culture can seem highly saturated with the invariable, same material, Artists Anonymous aim to reinvent painting through a unique approach to picture making which consistently includes a distinctive after-image. The way in which they work provokes a fresh and significant reflection on the nature of transgression in contemporary art.

 

Most works in the exhibition are presented in pairs. The first, oil painted on canvas conveying a seemingly innocent scene from an alternate world bathed in vibrant acidic colours, is hung next to its reflected counterpart. At first impression this seems identical, but upon closer inspection the viewer will detect not only a difference in the use of inverted darker, nightmarish colours, but also a change of detail verging on the macabre.

This act of experimenting with the boundaries of the art world and mainstream culture results in bringing painting and photography into direct contact with each other.  This practice produces a fusion of information and endless inversion, which in turn opposes today’s commodified contemporary art meltdown. The surreal effect of this twofold world of eccentric figures, transformed by masks or costume, incites a questioning of positives and negatives expanding our interpretation of what the opposing images might physically be and how we might receive and judge them.

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