ROB SHERWOOD – Prosthetics: Painting and Photography opens at SON Gallery

ROB SHERWOOD
Prosthetics: Painting and Photography opens at SON Gallery
30 April – 16 May
Private view: 29 April

6.30pm – 8pm

Son Gallery presents the work of painter Rob Sherwood seen for the first time in the wider context of his photographic, digital, and moving image making.

‘Prosthetics’ explores the relationship between these diverse media and their respective identifications with our notions of the natural and the artificial: it is in the evolving synapses between these poles that Sherwood’s multi-faceted practice stakes its claim.

Traditionally artistic subjectivity has been divorced from the use of stand-ins and devices or strategies based around replication, copying and simulacra: the latter often associated with a cold conceptualism. Sherwood’s work, conversely, inscribes the one in the other, his organic sensiblility as a painter informing the way in which he interacts with a technologically expanded cultural field.

As such Sherwood resembles a new strain of ‘post-expressivist’ artist, one who none the less deals with the problems of expression and representation in the 21st Century.

Sherwood’s practice is informed by a critical interest in the way evolving technologies affect ways of seeing. Using his training as a painter Sherwood makes use of both photography and film, exploring how lens based medias, with their capacity to deconstruct visual fields, interact with the tangibility of traditional painting techniques

Whereas digital art has tended to obsess with the expanded facility of networked cultures, Sherwood’s work reflects on digital facility itself. This, accordingly, is art about finding a depth of perception, literally and metaphorically, in a flat-screened world. Rather than being content with seeing society through its effulgence of pop images and simulacra.

Sherwood is highly aware of the material value and quality of his paints, brushes and canvases. This craftsmen’s awareness, combined with his use of traditional and at times archaic techniques, provides a stimulating contrast to the artificial inspirations for his paintings. Using the historical avant-garde’s old bastion of autonomy, the grid, and sensitively engaging with painting, film and photography, Sherwood offers us an assemblage of the self-expressive alongside social documentary.

More information about Rob Sherwood:

Born in Bristol, England in 1984 Rob lives and works in London.

He graduated from the B.A. in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art and Design of London in 2008. His work is already in several important private collections, having won the public vote in the Saatchi Gallery and Channel 4′s ‘New Sensations’ competition for 2008. He has also exhibited in high profile galleries in Europe and at the Venice Biennale.

More information about SON Gallery:

Photography is winning renewed critical acclaim: both as an evolving creative medium and as a vital part of our collective visual history. Artists of all media are engaging with photography in ever-more diverse ways, to the extent that we can now readily discuss the photographic condition of contemporary art.

At Son Gallery we believe it is our responsibility to provide a sustainable platform for photography-inspired artists to develop their professional careers. We will encourage our artists to create innovative work by offering challenging contexts for its creation and reception. This will include the curation of group and solo exhibitions accompanied by critical texts, discussions and other site-specific events and displays.

In addition, we will organise exhibitions and publications of important historical imagery. We will work with museums, foundations and collectors to make this imagery accessible so that emerging artists can creatively engage their practices with those of the past.

This strategic dialogue between past and present is indicative of a new generation’s artistic promise, based around a renewed concern for the processes of cultural production amid, and despite, the visual anarchy of contemporary society.

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