David Batchelor

This exhibition conveyed Batchelor’s preoccupation with colour, through various kinds of structures, often assemblages of second-hand objects. Those involving light boxes explicitly referred to illuminated signs, the shapes and colours of a metropolitan environment. They embodied an essentially abstract phenomenon but a closer look revealed their nuts and bolts, wiring and other means of construction, and thus the artist’s pragmatism.

The exhibition also included an installation of underlit warehouse dollies, a development out of Batchelor’s earlier Monochromobiles and a number of improvised works that employed a range of materials from fairy lights and cardboard boxes to coloured plastic bottles and fluorescent lamps. The Found Monochromes of London , a sequence of projected slides, depicted blank rectangles such as faded posters and empty billboards, superimposed on architecture and other surfaces of the city. The “monochrome” featured as a repeated void in a busy visual experience, exemplifying the possibility of the movement of art into life, and vice versa.

David Batchelor
Shiny Dirty