David Tremlett - 3 Drawing Rooms

British artist David Tremlett, best known for his site-specific wall drawings, makes a vast new work for Ikon, transforming the second floor galleries with geometric shapes, applied directly to the walls using pastel pigment and engine grease. Each of the three rooms has a contrasting composition: horizontal and vertical rectangular blocks of vivid colour, and grey and black, playing off the volumes of architectural space in order to ‘retune’ our perception of them.

Like all of Tremlett’s wall drawings, this work for Ikon has been conjured up in the artist’s imagination, before becoming scale studio drawings. The creation of the final work takes place over several weeks, with the artist and his assistants applying the colour painstakingly by hand. Tremlett’s artistic practice, developed after his formal training at Falmouth School of Art, Birmingham College of Art and the Royal College of Art, is characterised by a critical examination of what sculpture and indeed art could be; an interest in the creative process of making, rather than focusing on a final result. Tremlett refers to his work as objects, flat sculpture, rather than images which, for him, imply illusion. His compositions typically consist of geometric forms, abstract arrangements of arcs, circles, trapezoids, text and line – formal constructs which emanate a pure joy of colourand hue, and relationships between geometry and curved line.

A small publication accompanies the exhibition priced £1, including an interview with David Tremlett and Jonathan Watkins, Ikon Director. Visit Ikon’s online shop for the full range of Ikon’s catalogues and limited editions.

David Tremlett’s exhibition 3 Drawing Rooms is supported by The Abbey Harris Mural Fund.

David Tremlett - 3 Drawing Rooms

artist/s:
David Tremlett