Spotlight: Sam Bailey and The HIX Award 2018

Surreptitiously housed down the winding staircase of the Tramshed Restaurant, Shoreditch, HIX ART Gallery has slowly but surely established itself as a forward-thinking hub of contemporary art in London’s lively East End. Known formerly as the Cock ‘n’ Bull Gallery—named after the eponymous sculpture of Damien Hirst, elevated in monumental style above the diners upstairs—the gallery was inaugurated back in 2012 with a succinct manifesto for progressive and exciting art exhibitions that drew from established voices to the very best of London’s up-and-coming.

Occupying the cosy basement area of the restaurant and fuelled by the passion of its founder Mark Hix—friend to many of the YBAs and himself a dedicated art enthusiast—the gallery is currently curated by the talented Sophie Harriott, turning around a series of six-weekly shows that engage with a plethora of artistic styles and concepts.

In the last year alone, they have exhibited infamous illusionist and oxymoron aficionado Patrick Hughes—accompanied by all 12 of his studio assistants; the pop-expressionist social vignettes of Philipp Rudolf Humm; the celebratory yet subversive all-female Brains & Lip Takeover show; and numerous solo-presentations of nascent artistic careers, including the Matisse-come-Perry still lifes of Jacob Yarwood, the quasi-exotic surrealism of Joshua Raz or the prosaic yet heroic figures of Ben Edge’s intimate outsider portraits.

Launched soon after its opening, in 2013, was The HIX Award. Confronting the irksome limbo that exists between graduation and going-pro, the Award aims to foster a breadth of young artists teetering on the proverbial knife-edge of their gesso stained palettes. Since its inception, the Award has garnered a national reputation for its accessibility and success. Nominated artists take part in a curated group exhibition at HIX, with a generous cash prize and solo-show presented to the winner.

Shortlisted by Hix himself, each year’s finalists are judged by a new cohort of esteemed visual artists, the panel having included the likes of Stephen Webster and Dylan Jones, as well some of Britain’s favourite enfant terribles, the YBA’s Tracey Emin and Gavin Turk. The unique addition of a People’s Choice Award provides a direct link between the artists and public; a germane and novel dialogue for artists at such an early stage of their career.

The HIX Gallery’s earnest manifesto is ratified by its Award’s talented alumni. It’s first winner, Nicholas Permain, selected for the prestigious FBA Futures in 2015; its second, Felix Treadwell, named GQ’s ‘British Artist to Watch’ in 2017; and its third, Ally McIntyre, a print of her HIX Award-winning painting, Moon Cries for Ferdinand, now a part of the V&A’s permanent collection. Sam Bailey, the most recent of which, busy grinding away in his studio in advance of his solo-show with HIX in November. 



Graduating from Central Saint Martins in 2017, Bailey’s works are a series of mnemonic whispers. Layering watercolour and gouache on archival newsprint, anonymous and lurid apparitions are laced with a subtle melancholy. Both aesthetic and haptic, the material substance of his work echoes the DIY ethos of his subjects: images of activists from various protests in the 1980s, such as the Women Peace Camps of Greenham Common, the subject of his winning piece, Smoker 3 (2017).

A nauseous blend of mustard green and hollow grey, the self-effacing figure oscillates from recognition to neglect; the loose splatters and stains evoking a warm and quasi-nostalgic dotage. The materiality of his portraits—Baconesque phantoms that beleaguer the histories of protest, media and affect—are indeed concerned with questions of time and physicality during the crossover from Fordist to Post-Fordist modes of production and consumption. However, their very inability to be grasped—like memories themselves—reflects the cognitive dissonance of an age; stretched from nostalgia to futurism, paranoia to anaesthesia.

Whilst Smoker 3 exudes a plaintive disposition, Bailey’s works equally turn to the fiercely existential. Whilst his palette seamlessly shifts from darker hues to the ethereal, his characters’ consistent lack of a graspable identity is tantamount. His work, Beanie Test (2018), reminiscent of the supreme alienation one would find in Giacometti’s Annette (1952), the mix of muddied flesh and vertiginous black souls a rapturous expression of the modern self.

Ahead of his upcoming solo-show this November at HIX, I spoke with him about the Award, his work, and the ambivalence of digital life.

Smoker 3 (2017) (left) and Beanie Test (2018) (right)

So, Sam, how did you hear about the HIX Award?

There was a card left by my work at the St Martins degree show and then a few days later Sophie Harriot from the gallery emailed me suggesting I apply. I’d had a few emails asking for applications for various opportunities but Sophie’s was noticeably more personable. It’s been an incredibly generous and friendly experience from the beginning. 

How was your experience of the Award?

It was great, it was very exciting to get shortlisted and to be given the opportunity to show work alongside, and meet, so many talented artists. It was a real boost after graduating.

How has winning the HIX Award contributed to your practice?

Most importantly being able to focus on making artwork, there’s no way I would have been able to spend so much time in the studio without winning the prize. Also, the added confidence it gives you after graduating to push the work further.

Was there a favourite moment for you?

Probably being high fived by the artist Sue Webster at the after party, on the night of the award, it topped what had already been such an overwhelming and surreal evening.

Let’s talk about about your work, Smoker 3, which won the prize.

Where does the image come from?

This series depicts images of activists and protestors based on archival photographs. The activist shown is from a protest at Greenham Common, smoking in one of the Peace Camps, taking time to pause and think, but also achieving something at the same time by the very nature of being present, in occupation.

Do you always work on newspaper print?

I wouldn’t say always, I had a time when I focused on it more than other surfaces but now it’s one of a few. It came about from using whatever paper was at hand for testing ideas and I liked the effects I was getting with it, slightly blurred imagery, the paint bleeds into it much more than thicker paper. I wanted to use it for a project and it felt right when researching activists from the eighties, as a reference to pre-digital information exchange.

Is there a nostalgia at play here? For this pre-digital age?

There is an aspect of that in some recent work as it’s an age I grew up in but I’m not looking to make artwork that’s sentimental, or prescriptively saying the past was better than the present. I do have mixed feelings about the internet, it’s a great tool creatively, for research and learning, but the way it is with us all the time on mobile devices, meaning we’re essentially on call 24/7 is not so healthy. There seems to be much more time pressure today, to constantly be productive and quicker.

Protesting, of a kind, has also started to inhabit that space in a questionable one click fashion on social media. I wanted to look at protests in the UK when people didn’t have those tools, how committed they were and how for them time and their physical presence over long periods through occupation, were their weapons.

So, you work is an attempt to wrestle with these ideas of contemporary protest?

Not overtly, but it’s certainly been a contributing factor to my interest in the theme of historic protest. It’s hard to imagine that some aspects of ‘online activism’ will have a significant impact, particularly in the echo chamber scenario where likeminded people share their views and support for causes. But the internet has also been a great tool in raising awareness of positive action successfully, such as the Women’s March on London last year.

Is your emphasis on the importance time, materiality and physical presence, best understood in opposition to the hyperactivity of the internet?

Yes, it is. I’m really not very prolific when it comes to painting because I like to spend so much time looking at my work before I take the next step, building up layers and seeing where the work takes me, it’s a slow process. And yes, it has been a reactionary way of making work, I want to make artwork where the hand is evident and escapes the general homogenization of experience through slick digital media.

When I was studying there was a lot of work being made digitally, taking on our current malaise by using the same technology, there were some really impressive artworks being produced. But for me when I used something digital to make artwork it felt like I knew the end product before I got there, it felt too planned. I wanted to go back to making work where the outcome wasn’t so clear and human error, and the materials I used, created their own unexpected results.

Opening this November, Bailey’s upcoming show will continue in this earnest, painterly vein. Reflecting the confidence the success of the Award has given him, expect a series of works which push Bailey’s use of colour and scale to new heights. Continuing to work from used photographs, his new series will hone in on the perpetual twilight of our current 24/7 malaise of non-stop connectivity. Citing the work of painters such as Pierre Bonnard and Sterling Ruby, the show is likely to push its audience to the affective limit, combining historical sense with intuitive sensibility. To quote one of his favourite authors, Jonathan Crary, Bailey’s works are “a dark prospectus of human life in the absence of community or civil society.” One he renders, nonetheless, in a dazzling beauty.

Review: 'Slippage' at The Post_Institute

Slippage: Performative Utterances in Painting at The Post_Institute

Curated by Oliver Morris Jones & Lucy Von Goetz

Reviewed for Arteviste.

Five years ago, the Gagosian held an exhibition at Britannia Street titled ‘The Show Is Over’, a survey of twenty-eight artists addressing the supposed yet never concluded death of painting. Of course, given the Gagosian’s structurally seismic gender imbalance – only 1 of 28 artists being female – the show would never produce a legitimate answer to its proposed quandary. Nonetheless, the corpus of postmodern abstraction and contemporary gambits on show at least demonstrated one clear hypothesis: the increasingly discursive fabric of painting in the expanded field. 

Drawing from this open legacy is the inaugural show of The Post_Institute, ‘Slippage: Performative Utterances in Painting’, an exhibition of five artists which similarly educes the hermeneutics of painting and its increasingly heterogeneous vernacular. 

Housed discreetly in an ex-Christmas tree warehouse in the post-industrial units of Brixton, South London, the exhibition is the second project of the nascent Von Goetz Art – a nomadic curatorial enterprise spearheaded by the eponymous Lucy Von Goetz. After the success of its first show last December, ‘The Long Count’ – a group show focused on the importance of myth and identity in art and contemporary sports – Lucy is joined by co-curator Oliver Morris Jones to strip back painting to its rawest ephemeral form. The result is an acute yet modest representation of the current relationship between abstraction, painting and the slippery visual language of contemporary art. 

Nowhere is this clearer than the large-scale achromatic wall work by Lucas Dupuy, a site-specific painting that exerts a subtle sovereignty in the space, delicately weaving the extensive floorplan into a fertile visual dialogue. A rich mixture of modernist odes and personal reflections on urban space and dyslexia, the domestic-come-Brutalist form of the wall is layered with an increasingly cobalt constructivism that blurs language with a minimalist phenomenology of space. 

So too, his smaller works on paper and canvas further evoke the form and symbolism of musical orthography. Through the use of grid-work and calligraphic pattern, Dupuy simultaneously references his background in graffiti as well as the haziness of reading with dyslexia. The parallel works, headed under the same title, Everything You Do Is A Balloon (2017), push Dupuy’s practice to its most aesthetic; a series of evanescent crosshairs that gasp across the canvas, tuned with a Photoshop precision. 

Similarly provoking a sense of digital photorealism are the paintings of Martine Poppe. Ethereal palettes of cantaloupe, sky blue and china give her cloudscapes an opal effect of dizzying beauty. Approached head on they appear emphatically flat, however, glimpsed from an angle they acquire a pearlescent sheen, revealing a meticulously uniform pattern of crested brushstrokes, a style not unlike the rich impasto of Erich Heckel’s Hafenbahn im Winter (1906) or the subtle dynamism of Gerhard Richter’s Grau (Grey) (1970), presented here with an eerie depthlessness, accursed to the logic of a screen. 

Sparsed throughout the exhibition are a handful of Poppe’s sculptural works: photographic prints dipped in resin and moulded into ‘Tumbleweed’ balls. In contrast to their predominantly wall-hung surroundings the various tumbleweeds are an aphoristic expression of the contemporary materiality of images – a sentiment m in her choice to lay bare the support frame of her paintings, an art-historical quip reminiscent of Jasper John’s two balls or Fontana’s infamous slice, albeit with a wholly contemporary manifestation; a technique similar to the transparent canvas used in Antoine Langenieux’s ‘Assemblage’ paintings – images somewhat indicative of their corollary Instagram feeds and tap screens. 

The only other sculpture on show belongs to artist Mike Ballard. A toxic green form of repurposed hoarding and timber, laced with splatters and trims of violet – a minimalist icon similar to those of Micheal Dean, evoking the analogous palette of Nike’s electric green sportswear, a reconfiguration of inner-urban fashion through a nascent post-industrial lens. Described by Ben Tuffnell as “a kind of illegible urban language”, the work reflects on the aesthetics of graffiti, the city and their contingent symbiotic fabric – a matrix similarly explored by contemporaries such as Ralph Hunter-Menzies, Kristian Touborg or David Von Bahr. 

Ballard’s 2-D works elicit the same territories of urban aesthetics – their mixture of industrial grit, photocopy toner and raw abstraction juxtaposed to the surrounding works by Konrad Wyrebek and Ry David Bradley, two artists that, in contrast, draw explicitly from the online world. The former, Wyrebeck, creates large multi-media paintings of corrupted .jpeg files – a series titled ‘Data Error’ – which bounce between net-native nostalgia and ecological anxiety. Whilst the latter, Bradley, uses digital brushes to c&p once-oblique images into wonderfully abstract compositions of artificial flora, echoing the kitsch chic of post-internet tropes that endlessly circulate from image board to image board. 

Nevertheless, The Post_Institute’s inaugural show engrains itself within a distinct temporality. The proximate closure of the building itself – no doubt demolished and redeveloped into a series of luxury apartments – places the show within an odd liminal space. Caught between the shifting aesthetics of IRL and URL, public and private, intention and interpretation, the five artists displayed provide a succinct survey of the slippery nature of painting’s visual semantics; to quote the figure behind the exhibition’s sub-titular locution, JL Austin: “Faced with the nonsense question ‘What is the meaning of a word?’, and perhaps dimly recognising it to be nonsense, we are nevertheless not inclined to give it up.” The same can be said of course, of painting, art, or culture per se. An endeavour that The Post_Institute seems healthily unafraid in confronting, and in this case, is successfully negotiated through both diverse and intimate terms.

check out the review here!

Review: 'The Politics of Pink' at The Dot Project

The Politics of Pink at The Dot Project

The colour pink oscillates between two contemporary poles. Whilst it’s true that gender identity has, for some, become an increasingly fluid concept, unshackling pink from its quasi-victorian hangover of domestic femininity. It seems evident that pink has equally become the lingua franca for a new generation of online culture: the kitsch post-net boudoir of Molly Soda’s 'From My Bedrooms to Yours' (2015); the hyper-pop bubblegum of Hannah Diamond’s early PC-Music track Pink and Blue (2013); or the endless deluge of seapunk and vaporwave’s crypto-ironic love of pink hues, both pastel and neon. In each case the association between pink and femininity is affirmed, if not successfully subverted; reinscribing pink as the operative hue of feminine affect. 

Born from within this matrix is The Dot Project’s latest show ‘The Politics of Pink’, an all-male show of seven contemporary artists who collectively explore the socio-aesthetic power of the colour pink, stretching from its raw affectivity to its constructed social utility. The show has an immediate intimacy to it, a sense helped by the gallery’s own architecture, a cosy two-storey space located on the cordial street of Fulham Road, South Kensington. As such, the paintings are displayed in a soft dialogue, their sustained palettes offering subtle tensions that sew the works together. 

The seven artists on show, despite their analogous palettes - either a mainstay in their practice or chosen specifically for the exhibition - approach the concept through diverse means. Whether it’s the New Age spiritualism meets Kanagawa waves of Matthew F Fisher’s glossy L.A. funk, the corrupted bricolage of digital content found in Konrad Wyrebek’s Pinkey(fvk) (2018) – comprising images of YouPorn, Brexit, flamingos and Angela Merkel’s pantsuit – or the aesthetic counterbalance of metallic and pastel forms in Elliot Fox’s reflections on urban masculinity, the artworks displayed provide a breadth of response to the materiality and semiotics of pink.

Upstairs at The Dot Project are several paintings by the Spanish artist Albert Riera Galceran, a young artist whose practice traverses an array of video, print, paint and photography – guided by the visual language of what he calls ‘pure intuition’. Lacking in any clear corporeal form, the two paintings on show - Untitled I (2018) & Untitled II (2018) - appear as the spontaneous mixture of artistic sense with organic sensibility. Both works are intuitively harmonious, the weight and gravitation of each circular shell drifting across the canvas like leaves in an empyrean fall.

The palette and composition of Untitled I is reminiscent of Lee Krasner’s epic work, The Seasons (1957) - a mixture of olive greens, sky blues and watermelon pinks - a resonance which further lends itself to those viewers with autumnal predilections. The inclusion of a small vignette in the upper right-hand corner – the transgressive drag queen ‘Divine’ of John Water’s notorious black comedy Pink Flamingos (1972) – anchors this ostensible bliss within a radically gendered politics. A pop-cultural thread that runs throughout many of Galceran’s paintings. 

Comparatively, the glaucous blue and faint impression of stems in Untitled II evokes a wintery disposition. The shapes and brevity of this work seem closer to that of a late De Kooning, such as his series of Untitled works – dubbed by MoMA ‘The Late Paintings’ - from the earlier half of the 1980s. Galceran’s work carries with it the same sense of embodied fragility that underscored this later phase of De Kooning’s career, using lyrical and sinuous forms to evoke the biomorphic harmony of nature. A work which carries itself with the best of its contemporaries, such as the paintings of Caterina Silva or Jenny Brosinski. 

Downstairs at the gallery, hung adjacent to several textured works by Richie Culver – a pair of grittier works which combine pasted wallpaper with blackletter captions such as ‘Kingdom’ and ‘Pound’ – are another pair of paintings, this time form artist Reuben Beren James. A fleshy mixture of white, pink and salmon, the two works resemble Cy Twombly’s virulent mark-making, colours mixed after a visit to the slaughterhouse. Their complete lack of figuration suspends the works in pure abstraction, pushing compositional logics to the extreme. The excision of an inverted rectangular strip – a silkscreened layer, the result manipulated files repressed on canvas and further approached with paint – introduces a photographic clarity to the right-hand work, The sit and straddle (2018).

Poised next to the haptic work of Culver, James’ two works are the clearest manifestation of pink pushed to its affective limit. In a brief interview with The Dot Project, James was explicit in its reference to the ‘cultural connotations’ of pink and femininity; the title of his series, ‘Pink is for Pussies’, seemingly cut from the primordial soup of kiss-and-chase playground politics, an innocuous yet ossifying stage for the development of gender normativity in contemporary life. The various titles themselves – The sit and straddle, The up and over (2018) and The down but not out (2018) – are ambiguous enough, however are drawn from sexual positions listed in Cosmo’s voluptuous column: ‘7 Sex Positions Pretty Much Guaranteed to Help You Orgasm’ – a Delphic whisp to the subconscious edge of affective representation, and a clear nod to the continuing symbolic assumptions associated with a pink laced with its own ferocity and power. 

As a whole, ‘The Politics of Pink’, in keeping with its conceptual provenance, remains playfully ambivalent in its conclusions. The artists presented tease the colour’s cultural associations, if – in the case of Galceran – occasionally charging their work with a more provocative referent. To quote James himself, “Think of it like a Rorschach test, only instead of me letting you freely associate the abstract forms, I push the viewer to assess their character beyond the formal qualities.” For now, it would seem that the progression of pink towards gender-neutrality remains inchoate, not least for the attempts made to marketize this shift when it does happen. However, the paintings displayed at The Dot Project are clever ruminations on the sense of pink that forever escapes our socially informed biases; a prefigurative wink to its raw and latent affectivity. A gesture we could say is, in and of its self, political.