Alan Uglow / Johan Vandermaelen

The Center for Contemporary Non-Objective Art (CCNOA) is pleased to present an exhibition by British-born, New York-based artist Alan Uglow. A series of recent photo silk-screens and a freestanding painting continue Uglow’s practice of isolating and abstracting elements from a primary context and representing them through analogous forms. While best known for monochromatic paintings concerned with the edge and the literal frame of the picture-support, Uglow’s body of work also includes photography and site-specific installations. Along with an emphasis on structure, materiality, and the reducing of forms to their constituent elements, his diverse artistic practice is marked by a lifelong fascination with the game of football. The spatial arrangement of the football pitch is partly the source for the rectangular, bisected fields in his Standard paintings, for example--a syntactical similarity present in his work since the late 60s. Uglow’s recent work continues this connection through forms drawn from stadium architecture and re-presented through a rigorous process of abstraction. A photograph of a tunnel from the Müngersdorfer Stadion in Cologne, Germany, which players use to enter and leave the pitch, is turned into a site-specific photo-silkscreen. Uglow subjects this image of a functional, built structure to a myriad of painterly choices about color, flatness, and tonality, turning it into a minimal still-film. Similarly, Uglow turns a “Goal Wall”, an object used by footballers for shooting practice into a freestanding painting, the aluminum panel is stabilized with metal supports behind the panel. Toward the top left corner and the lower right corner two circles, slightly larger than a football have been cut out, this emphasizes the built quality of the painting an aspect of Uglow’s best-known Standard paintings. In both cases, as in the bulk of Uglow’s work, the emphasis on framing and materiality highlights the object’s relationship to a context beyond its purely formal boundaries. Alan Uglow was born in Luton, England, in 1941. His work has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions in Europe and North America, as well as in group shows worldwide. He has lived and worked in New York City since 1969.

For the CCNOA entrance, Johan Vandermaelen has created a new audio work entitled The Tickness of Air. Johan Vandermaelen considers himself as an autodidact. Of course his workshop (instument building) with Hugh Davies in the late seventies and a two-year electronic seminar at the Royal Conservatory of Antwerp (with Joris De Laet) were important to him. Since the end of the seventies he played in several improvisation ensembles, performed works by John Cage, Alvin Lucier and many others, composed music for museums and movies, participated in radio programs of The Flemish Public Radio, and recorded 'contemporary classics' such as Black Angels from Georges Crumb (+ a live performance of this piece with the Brodsky quartet). More recently he focussed on being a sound engineer and worked with IFiamminghi, Dirk Brossé, The Festival van Vlaanderen, Happy New Ears Festival, Kunstenfestival des Arts, November Music, Octobre en Normandie, Champ d'Action, Phill Niblock, Stevie Wishart, QO-2, Archie Shepp, etc. He often assists in the realisation of conceptual art of Belgian and international artists, such as Christoph Fink, Ilya Kabakov, Vito Acconci, Joelle Tuerlinckx, Robert Smithson, Maria Blondeel, Emilio Lopez Menchero, Marijke van Warmerdam, Suchan Kinoshita, ... as well as in museum projects and events (e.g. Brussel 2000, Brugge 2002 etc.). As a composer, he focuses on location related projects. (Live-) Electronics have always been important in his artistic practice – solo as well as part of the live-computer duo 1km2km@... (with Guy De Bièvre), the e-x-it duo with multi-instrumentalist Marco Loprieno, and ‘Zoning’ a laptop quartet + project on industrial zones with Aernoudt Jacobs (tmrx), Benoit Deuxant and Roland ‘Anton Aeki’ Wouters (Martiens-go-home).

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Alan Uglow / Johan Vandermaelen