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Iavor Lubomirov - Haloclines

HALOCLINES
I would like to announce that the first collaborative work between Iavor Lubomirov and Valeriya N-Georg will be exhibited at:

JESSICA CARLISLE GALLERY
4 Mandeville Place
London W1U 2BF

Iavor Lubomirov in collaboration with
Katrina Blannin, Abi Box, Lee Edwards, Rab Harling, Lee Maelzer, Valeriya N-Georg

Private View: Tuesday 13th December 6-9pm
Open: Wednesday 14th to Sunday 18th 12-6pm

‘Haloclines’ is a project by Iavor Lubomirov exploring the making of work in collaborative pairings. Through a body of collaborations with six other artists, Lubomirov is searching for the visual and conceptual boundaries that form between two artists’ interventions within a single object – those edges where the eye can suddenly discern the beginning of one artist’s hand and mind and the end of another, and vice versa.

The exhibition takes its title from the visual phenomenon which occurs within a confluence of two bodies of water of different salinity - a halocline. In this project there is a similar sense of two different exhibitions embodied within the same collection of work. Both a solo project and a group show, Haloclines carries notions particular to Lubomirov’s background as both an artist and a curator and of the kind of relationships and conversations that emerge from this experience. Thus the exhibition reads like a curated group show, comprised of different, but related objects and styles, while simultaneously it should be possible to observe, emerging amongst these diverse works, a clear, unifying, underlying whole, with visual veins of geometry, running through the works in the form of squares, rectangles and ellipses, of systematic assembly, and recurring elliptical curves, which speak not just of the mind of a curator, but also the hand of a single artist.

Lubomirov’s work is primarily sculptural. He aggregates physical shapes, usually built up in layers, as a way of exploring the materiality of time through the sequential accumulation of matter. For the most part, in this exhibition, he has sculpturally transformed the work of other artists by cutting and reassembling their paintings, prints or photographs. The interweaving leitmotifs are the positive and negative ellipse-based prism, or column. The process is reversed for two of the collaborations, so that Lubomirov’s work in turn becomes the basis for another artist’s. In one of these, an early paper sculpture is deconstructed into its individual layers and its negative spaces ‘plugged’ with printed images, cut to size. In another, Lubomirov has lent his geometry to a painter, who then interpreted and transformed it using her own language and intuition about shape and composition and adding elements of colour and space.

The exhibition is designed to change its aspect according to the viewer’s position within the space. Visitors are invited to walk around the work and observe the show from different parts of the gallery.

About the artists

This project began with a conversation between Iavor Lubomirov and painter Abi Box in 2014, prompted by observations about the freedom with which Box paints in contrast with the precision and linearity of Lubomirov’s sculptures. Abi Box’s painting is inspired by the different places and environments she visits, and in them she is looking to challenge the viewer’s sense of depth by rearranging space on the canvas while moving between figuration and abstraction. Box began a work on a canvas with the specific intention that Lubomirov would then be free to dismember and reconstitute her work, allowing Box to approach the painting with a ‘liberating sense of detachment and experiment’. The imagery was drawn from landscape, forestry and photographs of a stone wall covered in lichen, almost map-like. Lubomirov in turn responded to the linear markings and map-like structure of the image through the use of vertical cuts and a curved spatial warping of her image. He was particularly interested in compressing its sides through increased overlap of the cut layers around the curve, much like the way that map topology becomes stretched and distorted when moving between a globe and flat-map format. Both artists’ work outside the collaboration was influenced by the experience: Box becoming more aware of the significance of drawing in her paintings and Lubomirov allowing a much freer line cutting and construction, so that it is possible to observe organic undulations in the surface of this sculpture not present in his work heretofore.

Soon after, Lubomirov and Rab Harling started talking about making work together using as source material Harling’s series of photographs taken inside the controversial Balfron Tower over the space of many years. From the earliest stages of Harling’s epic project, Lubomirov was involved in a curatorial role, exhibiting the work as it developed in two group shows and one solo show spread over four years. From the start, Lubomirov was fascinated by Harling’s systematic and precise method and by the structured nature of his series of images. For Haloclines, Lubomirov has finished the first of three planned collaborative objects, in which he is looking to excavate and open up the vast cellular interior of the Goldfinger building, together with its now lost human history, which is so richly captured in Harling’s work.

Lee Maelzer is a painter whom Lubomirov first met as an artist during a project in Sweden in 2008 and when he later opened his first gallery in 2009/10, Maelzer was one of the first solo shows he curated. He has since both curated group and solo shows with Lee Maelzer’s work, exhibited with her, shown his own work in an exhibition curated by her and exchanged artworks. Once the seed of a show of collaborations was planted, the idea of approaching Maelzer for a canvas to cut soon followed and she responded with a detailed work of a hillside covered in a rolling blanket of stones. Maelzer often depicts vast accumulations of debris such as man-made rubbish, or wild sprawls of back-garden flora and she was interested in the possibilities of further fragmentation that might result through Lubomirov’s methods of dissection and reconfiguration. For this collaboration Lubomirov responded by experimenting with assembling curved, rather than straight layers, to add a sense of vertigo to Maelzer’s already dynamically loaded image, in which the piles of rocks and stones barely held back by sparse bushes seem on the verge of landsliding off the bottom of the canvas.

In 2014 Lubomirov’s work was part of an exhibition curated by Becca Pelly-Fry entitled ‘Perfectionism’ in which there was also work by Lee Edwards – a set of finely executed miniature portraits, painted, or rather drawn with a brush, into cross sections cut out of tree branches. Drawn both to Edwards’ method and his empathetic response to the material on which he works, Lubomirov approached him with an idea that would balance his role in the other collaborations initiated at that point. Lee Edwards has a fascination for the prominence of the ‘negative space’ within his works- the areas of untouched surface which surround, contribute to and have a relationship with the work being made. In this collaborative piece he has responded to an empty void defined by the shapes cut out in a sub-relief paper sculpture created earlier by Iavor Lubomirov. Whereas Lee usually works within the mediums of drawing and painting, here he utilises printed images, cutting them to size, layering and plugging in the gaps.

In the same ‘Perfectionism’ exhibition, Lubomirov first came across Katrina Blannin’s paintings. Later Lubomirov and Blannin also showed together in a project at the Oxford University Mathematics Institute and thus became more involved in conversations about the place of geometry in art. Lubomirov approached Blannin about working together on a set of geometric permutations of squares which he had been thinking about for a number of years. Katrina Blannin is interested in processes of experimenting with simple systems – palindromic and isochromatic structures – aiming to produce paintings with logical clarity, and spatial and material character. In her work she re-examines historical colour theories and early Renaissance painting conventions, specifically concerning form, and transfers these into an investigative process which asks questions of later constructivist and concrete art, in order to generate new possibilities. Taking Lubomirov’s simple visualisations of cyclic permutations of incrementally sized squares constrained within a larger square, Blannin has produced three paintings for this exhibition, which are themselves like components in a larger possible space of permutations, or letters in a word.

The final piece in this show is a collaboration with printmaker Valeriya N-Georg. N-Georg is inspired by Neuroscience, Psychology and Consciousness Studies and works with a range of media: drawing, printmaking, sculpture, digital and mixed media. She combines digital production with making by hand and has developed experimental new techniques for making monotype prints, based on layered acrylic gel on boards and light box installations, which she scans, collages and manipulates digitally to create large scale digital prints. Influenced by Antonio Damasio's research on the role of emotions and feelings for our life-regulating processes and well-being, Valeriya N-Georg created for this collaboration a translucent monotype layered gel print with an image of the Oxytocin hormone, referencing the experience of working with someone else, of trust, anxiety and joy. Lubomirov has in turn disassembled this into small pieces and built them into an upright cylindrical form, so that N-Georg’s image is both contained within his sculpture and also wrapped around it. By using transparent pieces of Perspex, and raising the work vertically, Lubomirov is also allowing light to come through N-Georg’s image, drawing out the translucency of the material and the visceral skin like quality of the image.


Please click here to visit Iavor Lubomirov website
06/12/2016
HALOCLINES

JESSICA CARLISLE GALLERY
4 Mandeville Place
London W1U 2BF

Iavor Lubomirov in collaboration with
Katrina Blannin, Abi Box, Lee Edwards, Rab Harling, Lee Maelzer, Valeriya N-Georg

Private View: Tuesday 13th December 6-9pm
Open: Wednesday 14th to Sunday 18th 12-6pm