SETS ADDICT
30th November – 20th December 2018
Gallery hours: Friday + Saturday 12-6pm (and by appointment at other times)
Please join us for Christmas drinks on Saturday 15th December from 6-8pm
“I nearly always do prints in sets. There’s something very nice about being able to do a sequence of things that are related. And most of my prints come in those kinds of sets. With painting, I may have a mental set, but it’s very unlikely that someone is going to come in and buy a set of 12 paintings.”
Michael Craig-Martin
There is something pure and satisfying about seeing a complete set of prints with matching numbers in mint condition presented in a single row or a neat grid format. For a serious collector, it’s on a par with being dealt a Royal Flush in poker. There’s the sense of scarcity – as many sets get broken up when prints are sold individually – but there’s also the feeling of seeing the bigger picture or experiencing the full narrative.
To encounter all ten of Andy Warhol’ s Marilyn screenprints (1967) is altogether different to standing in front of one. “Repetition adds up to reputation” Warhol once stated, and it is only by seeing more than one that repetition starts to play a role. Similarly, how we interpret Warhol’s set of ten Electric Chair screenprints (1971) differs to what we make of a single Warhol electric chair. Singularly, the iconography is confronting and brutal, but through serial presentation and varying colour combinations, the impact of the electric chair gives way to a more engulfing kaleidoscopic and psychedelic visual hum.
‘Sets Addict’ presents two complete sets of etchings by the Chapman brothers and Antony Gormley. Both sets are greater than the sum of their parts.
In Jake and Dinos Chapman’s Bedtime Tales for Sleepless Nights (2013) the Victorian morality tale gets re-imagined for less sanctimonious (and more misanthropic) times. This set offers older and younger viewers a darker take on the more familiar sugar-coated bedtime story genre.
Antony Gormley’s set of eleven linear etchings made in 2016 with a metal needle evoke states of embodiment and freedom; an enmeshment within a bounded body and release into space.