Ghosts at Fine Art Society Contemporary
Installation view, featuring Stuart Semple – ‘War in a Babylon’ & ‘Panic Bar’ with Thomas J Price’s sculpture.
Photo: courtest Fine Art Society / Stephen White photography
Stuart has created a series of new artworks for the group exhibition ‘Ghosts’ at Fine Art Society Contemporary in London.
Ghosts
How We Live in the Future
Juliette Losq | Macarena Yañez | Laura Oldfield Ford
Thomas J Price | Simon Terrill | Stuart Semple
The Fine Art Society, New Bond Street
4 March – 10 April 2015
www.faslondon.com
Alongside new works on paper and a large scale new painting, Stuart is also displaying the salvaged 12 bar door in the window of the gallery on New Bond Street. More information on the door can be found in Stuart’s recent blog post here.
Ghosts, at The Fine Art Society explores the failed project of modernism with a special focus on London, through the eyes of six contemporary artists. Class and politics are bound up in architecture, and each of these artists explores, from their own perspectives, the current social consequences of urban regeneration.
The title of the show refers to a London that never came to be, to the intentions of modernism that never quite played out. The idyll of post-war renewal through architecture now leaves itself open to decay, overgrowth and unchecked development. These artists present the experience of living in the remnants, in a memorial to modernism, as renewal is replaced by ‘regeneration’.
This subject is particularly prescient; some of London’s treasured cultural markers are under threat from an apparently exponential building project. The recent ‘destruction’ of the Paolozzi mosaics at Tottenham Court Road and closure of Soho’s cultural centres are examples that have raised debate around the threat of homogenisation, which London has always resisted. These artists react to the phenomenon of the city with particular insight and erudition; it is only fitting that this conversation is carried out at the Fine Art Society, along-time resident at London’s cultural heart.
Click for more:
The 12 Bar Door in the Art Newspaper
Stuart and curator Lee Cavaliere interview on Monocle Radio (at 37 mins)
[slideshow]
[/slideshow]
Read more about the exhibition:
Stuart Semple in RIBA: Ghosts-It is the quietest of these artists’ contributions on the social impact of regeneration in cities that talk the loudest
Stuart Semple on British Council “Ghosts-How we live in the future”
Stuart Semple on The Upcoming “Ghosts: How We Live in the Future at the Fine Art Society”