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Very Important People
EOA.PROJECTS GALLERY
40 ELCHO STREET
LONDON SW11 4AU
Mon- Sat 10:00 - 17:30
Alex Katz, Vivien in Black Hat,
2010, Silkscreen in 34 colors,
73 x 102 cm, Edition of 75
Sir Peter Blake, Mel Bochner, Chuck Close, Damien Hirst, Paul Insect, Noorah Kareem,
Alex Katz, Jeff Koons, Eric Parnes, Mohammed Shammarey, Rirkrit Tiravanija,
Andy Warhol, Joe Webb and Russell Young
PRIVATE VIEW
FRI 6 FEB / 6.30 – 8.30 PM
EOA.PROJECTS GALLERY
40 ELCHO STREET
LONDON SW11 4AU
A Very Important Person (VIP) is a person who is accorded special privileges
due to his or her status or importance. The special treatment usually involves
separation from common people, and a higher level of comfort.
ARTISTS
Sir Peter Blake is perhaps the most recognized and highly
regarded artist of the British Pop Art movement. Much of his
output – such as the sleeve for The Beatles’ ‘Sgt. Pepper’s
Lonely Hearts Club Band’ – has achieved iconic status.
Blake’s work reflects his fascination with all streams of
popular culture, and the beauty to be found in everyday
objects and surroundings. Many of his works feature found
printed materials such as photographs, comic strips or
advertising texts, combined with bold geometric patterns
and the use of primary colours. The works perfectly capture
the effervescent and optimistic ethos of the sixties, but
are also strikingly fresh and contemporary. There is also a
strain of sentimentality and nostalgia running throughout his
work, with particular focus towards childhood innocence and
reminiscence, as can be seen clearly in his recent Alphabet
series. Blake is renowned for his connection with the music
industry, having produced iconic album covers for the Beatles,
Paul Weller, The Who, and Oasis.
Mel Bochner’s approach and materials constantly vary;
in fact, the artist formally disavowed allegiance to a single
material in his famous essay titled “the Medium and the
Tedium” (2010). Bochner—who has produced paintings,
installations, and photography—is noted to be one of the
most influential pioneers of Conceptual art, and the organizer
of the first Conceptual art exhibition in 1966. A recurring theme
in Bochner’s work is the relationship between language and
physical space or color. This is famously demonstrated in his
“Measurement” installations of the late 1960s, visualizing
the exact dimensions of rooms and exhibition spaces, and
thesaurus-inspired paintings of a single word and its synonyms.
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PROJECTS
Bochner formally studied under Douglas Wilson and Wilfred
Readio, though his eventual style would draw strong influence
from the works of Clyfford Still and Jean Dubuffet.
Chuck Close reinvented painting with his monumental
portraits, rendered with exquisite, exacting realism from
photographic sources. Playing with ideas of scale, color, and
form, Close has become famous for his rigorous, gridded
application of individual color squares, which, although
abstract up close, form unified, highly realistic images from
afar. “I think most paintings are a record of the decisions
that the artist made,” he said. “I just perhaps make them
a little clearer than some people have.” Close’s artificially
restrictive painting techniques stem in part from physical
limitations—he suffers from an inability to recognize faces,
and had a spinal injury in 1988 that left him largely paralyzed.
Close is particularly known for his portraits of artists, having
depicted Robert Rauschenberg, Cindy Sherman, and Richard
Serra, among countless others. His work links him not only
with Photorealists but also to Conceptual Art.
Damien Hirst undoubtedly the most acclaimed contemporary
artist of his generation. Genuine star of the YBA (Young British
Artists) movement, Hirst has always made a point of mixing
up his genres. Artist, entrepreneur and celebrity, he has
produced much of the most spectacular works in recent years
and helped to revolutionize the art market. From Freeze,
the artist’s first exhibition which he organized while still at
Goldsmith’s College in 1988, to the prestigious Turner Prize
awarded to him in 1995, from the diamond-encrusted skull
(For the Love of God, 2008) to the controversial sale of his work
at Sotheby’s in the same year, Damien Hirst always seeks to
subvert the system and thereby create some truly emblematic
pieces of art. Inspired by such diverse themes as life, death,
art, science and medicine Damien Hirst makes use of many
varied techniques including installation, sculpture, painting,
drawing, etching and silkscreen.
Paul Insect is best known for his exhibition “Bullion” at the
Lazarides Gallery. He also goes by the name PINS and works
with artist Luke Insect as the collective ‘Insect.” He has also
previously worked alongside Banksy at the London Cans
Festival.
Insect’s work has evolved from Victorian graphics to Dadaesque collage. There is a primitiveness to his aggressive
subject matter that is almost disguised by his joyous use of
colour and entertaining style. Insect’s dark content lends itself
to a fun, playful display of baby heads split open, Bishops
on i-books and smoking joints with clown hair and mice
noses, skeletal playboy bunnies adorned in bling and angels
clutching syringes. His images are provoking yet light-hearted
and demand a sense of morality that transcends common
acceptance.
Noorah Kareem born 1990 graduated with a diploma from the
Arts & Skills Institute, Riyadh in 2009. In 2012 Kareem pursued
a degree in the field of special Education- Behavioural Disorder
& Autism, Riyadh. Alumni of the Crossway Foundation Create
& Inspire competition 2011. Kareems work had been featured
in Design Magazine, Ayadi Magazine, Al Riyadh newspaper and
Al Hayat Newspaper and held in private collections in Saudi
Arabia, the United States and Australia.
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EOA.PROJECTS GALLERY
40 ELCHO STREET
LONDON SW11 4AU
Mon- Sat 10:00 - 17:30
Alex Katz is the outstanding protagonist of figurative Painting,
and one of the most influential painters in the world. Alex
Katz was often said to be one of the father of the Pop Art
movement, but his style was always independent on the
borderline between abstraction and realism. His paintings
are the result of a transformation of the three-dimensional
word in simplified landscapes and portraits of sophisticated
woman on canvas. Katz is well known for featuring his own
social milieu often depicting parties, portraits of friends
and fellow artists, and most notably, his wife Ada. Katz also
worked with collage, printmaking, and set design, increasingly
concentrating on these mediums and developing freestanding
sculptural cut outs. He later painted large-scale landscapes
and continues to work with natural themes in form of large
scale flower scenes in his works today.
Jeff Koons playfully tests the boundaries of commerce,
celebrity, banality and pleasure. He turns banal commercial
or everyday objects into art icons by using seductive materials,
a shift of scale and a contextual displacement. Koons’ largescale vinyl “Inflatables”, his enormous chromium stainless
steel “Balloon Dog” or the giant “Puppy” and “Split Rocker”
made of hundreds of flowers all follow this principle. Originally
licensed as a commodities broker, in the late 1970ies Koons
decided to become an artist and moved from Wall Street into a
factory-like studio in SoHo with hundreds of assistants. Since
then, he has produced different series like the Pre-New, a
series of domestic objects in strange new configurations, The
Equilibrium Series, consisting of basketballs floating in distilled
water tanks, or the Banality Series culminating with a sculpture
of Michael Jackson and his chimpanzee Bubbles. Koons is
widely regarded as one of the most important, influential, and
controversial contemporary artists. He constantly tests the
boundaries between art and commerce, high culture and mass
culture, readymade and art object, by decontextualizing his
objects and lifting them to iconic statuses. He has lifted art
out of the enclave of the genius-driven artist into the realms
of nowadays pop and commerce driven culture.
Eric Parnes is a multimedia artist and considers his art to
be “Neo-Orientalist,” meaning that which delves into the
visual appropriation and socio-political dynamics between
Eastern and Western culture. In a body of work that includes
photography, sculpture, painting, installation, and video,
Parnes draws equally from contemporary and historic
references. Past projects have addressed pop culture,
consumerism, corporate life, and violence, as well as the
Persian Empire and ancient Mesopotamia. His works also
build upon the artist’s experiences as an Iranian-American:
“I do see the two worlds from both ends—from the East and
from the West,” he says. “I can be found somewhere in there.
Mohammed Shammarey is a self-taught artist; he works with
painting, photography, silk-screen printing and sculpture. He
has held many solo exhibitions including shows held at his
atelier in Baghdad (in 1988, 1991 and 1999); FA Gallery, Kuwait,
2010, and Word, Object, Motion (with Simeen Farhat), Anya
Tish Gallery, Houston, Texas, in 2010. He has also participated
in group exhibitions such as Word into Art, British Museum,
London, 2006; Dafatir: Contemporary Iraqi Book Art, University
of North Texas, Denton, Texas, travelling exhibition, 2005–2008;
Iraqi Artists in Exile, Station Museum of Contemporary Art,
Houston, Texas, 2008; and Modernism and Iraq, Wallach Art
EOA.
PROJECTS
Gallery, Columbia University, 2009. 2013 - an Exhibition of
Works by Mohammed Al Shammarey ARTSPACE Dubai. 2012
Anya Tish Gallery Houston Tx Collective Reaction: FotoFest 2014
work is often inspired by literature and poetry, particularly the
writings of Rumi, Mahmoud Darwish and the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Since 2008, he has lived and worked in Houston, Texas.
Rirkrit Tiravanija born 1961 in Buenos Aires, Argentina studied
at the Whitney Independent Studies Program in New York, The
School of the Art Institute in Chicago, The Banff Center School
of Fine Arts in Banff, Canada, and The Ontario College of Art in
Toronto, Canada. Tiravanija now resides in New York, where he
teaches at the School of the Arts at Columbia University. Using
human interaction as his primary material, Tiravanija goes
beyond performance to create socially-engaged conceptual
works that blur the boundaries of art in novel ways and bridge
the division between public and private. Tiravanija initiates
ways to enable the public to be a part of the art-making
process, what has been called relational aesthetics. He won
a Hugo Boss Prize in 2004.
Andy Warhol obsessed with celebrity, consumer culture, and
mechanical (re)production, Pop artist Andy Warhol created
some of the most iconic images of the 20th century. As famous
for his quips as for his art—he variously mused that “art is
what you can get away with” and “everyone will be famous for
15 minutes”—Warhol drew widely from popular culture and
everyday subject matter, creating works like his 32 Campbell’s
Soup Cans (1962), Brillo pad box sculptures, and portraits of
Marilyn Monroe, using the medium of silk-screen printmaking
to achieve his characteristic hard edges and flat areas of color.
Known for his cultivation of celebrity, Factory studio (a radical
social and creative melting pot), and avant-garde films like
Chelsea Girls (1966), Warhol was also a mentor to artists like
Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. His Pop sensibility
is now standard practice, taken up by major contemporary
artists Richard Prince, Takashi Murakami, and Jeff Koons,
among countless others.
Joe Webb (1976-) uses vintage magazines and printed
ephemera that he has collected to create hand-made low fi
collages, no computer trickery in sight. Webb re-invents the
imagery taken from his collection of printed materials to create
simple and elegant, yet surreal, images that explore love and
longing. His work is inspired by the collage work of Peter Blake
amongst others. To create original editions Webb has stayed
true to the texture and feeling of collage by using real collaged
elements in the silkscreens as well as embossing and glazing.
Russell Young is interested in the places where the glamour of
the American dream meets the darkness of crime, addiction,
and death. He explores this in series such as “Dirty Pretty
Things” (2010), in which screen printed images of notoriously
tragic stars Marilyn Monroe and Kurt Cobain are sprinkled
with diamond flakes. Young began as a straightforward
photographer of celebrities, getting his start shooting the
cover for George Michael’s Faith album. Gradually, he shifted
his approach to become an artist whose work comments on
the phenomenon of celebrity portraiture. Young emulates
Andy Warhol’s printing style, applying saturated color over
screen printed images in which subjects appear blown up
and grainy, as though printed on newsprint.
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EOA.PROJECTS GALLERY
40 ELCHO STREET
LONDON SW11 4AU
Mon- Sat 10:00 - 17:30
EOA.PROJECTS
EOA.Projects was established in 2009 as a gallery platform for
artists working between the Middle East, Europe and United
States. Under the vision of Stephen Stapleton, founder of
Edge of Arabia and The Crossway Foundation, EOA.Projects
collaborates with artists in building their careers and
realising their potential to an international standard. Through
production studios in London and Jeddah, EOA.Projects
supports artists in developing new projects including limited
edition fine art prints and special commissions. In 2012, EOA.
Projects opened a 400m sq. gallery in South-West London
with a curated programme of exhibitions, film-screenings
and talks aimed at international audiences.
For appointments, a full artist biography and other press
enquiries please contact:
Mariam M. Hassan
Gallery Manager
+44 (0) 20 7350 1336
[email protected]
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For more information please visit the gallery website
eoaprojects.com
EOA.
PROJECTS
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MOHAMMED SHAMMAREY
MOTION
2013
GICELEE PRINT ON EPSON COLD PRESS
NATURAL TEXTURED MATT PAPER FOR
MUSEUM QUALITY PRINTS
112 X 137CM
EDITION OF 7
CHUCK CLOSE
KATE
2013
WATERCOLOUR PIGMENT PRINT
PETER BLAKE
MARILYN
2010
SILKSCREEN DIAMOND DUST
95 X 75 CM
EDITION OF 15
ERIC PARNES
NEO ORIENTALIST TM
2011
66 X 117 CM
OIL ON CANVAS
RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA
UNTITLED (LESS OIL MORE COURAGE)
2003
OIL ON CANVAS
30 X 40 CM
JEFF KOONS
PINK BOW
2013
ARCHIVAL PIGMENT PRINT
94 X 112 CM
EDITION OF 50
EOA.PROJECTS GALLERY
40 ELCHO STREET
LONDON SW11 4AU
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