Scott King

April 6 – May 2, 2006

Bortolami Dayan is proud to present, “Information,” a solo exhibition by the London-based artist Scott King. Underscored by a reverential love for British music (Joy Division, Dexys Midnight Runners, Dr. Feelgood, etc.), Scott King’s work adopts an idiosyncratic and multilayered approach that simultaneously embraces the worlds of art, advertising, graphic design, semiotics, politics, and popular culture. The title of King’s exhibition echoes that of the seminal 1970 exhibition of the same name held at MOMA, New York, which introduced global conceptualism to a broader audience. Like many of the artists in that exhibition, King explores the languages, processes and procedures of commerce, business, and bureaucracy through his subversive deployment of charts, diagrams and statistics.

Consistent to King’s approach – in addition to the works dry, and often deadpan humor – is the paring down of complex psychological, sociological, and political ‘content’ into seemingly dispassionate graphical schemes: the results of which often resemble a hybrid of information design and hard-edge abstraction. Through this paradoxical impulse – a desire to apply ‘order’ onto ‘chaos’, a desire to apply ‘form’ to the ‘formless’ - King gently subverts the methodologies of science, marketing, history, art and politics.

After working as the art director at the pioneering British style magazine i-D in the early 1990s, King (with co-conspirator, the historian Matt Worley) created the polemical antijournal CRASH! CRASH! – like Wyndham Lewis’s early 20th Century journal BLAST - favored a kind of dandyish, manifesto-like sloganeering. Parodying – to often sardonic effect - every polemical media strategy of the previous 50 years, CRASH! was created as a way to critique and comment on what King and Worley saw as the banalities and deceptions at the heart of (British) culture: e.g. they were as scathing of the then emerging ‘young British art’ as they were of the then presiding notions of ‘Cool Britannia.’ Subsequently as the Creative Director of upstart style magazine Sleazenation, King, often in cahoots with Worley, created some of the wittiest and genuinely subversive editorial spreads and cover stories to appear in the ‘mainstream’ press. Taking no ideological prisoners, King and Worley’s pointed riffs on such controversial subjects such as terrorism, hooliganism, policing, and the politics of style remain design and editorial classics. King’s many other design projects have included album covers for Suicide, Pet Shop Boys, Morrissey, and Earl Brutus amongst others.

Scott King was born in Goole Yorkshire, England,1969. He currently lives and works in London. He has had solo exhibitions at Herald Street Gallery, London and Sonia Rosso, Turin. King’s work has been included in various group exhibitions such as “CRASH!”, ICA, London; “Communicate: British Graphic Design Since The Sixties”, The Barbican, London; “Other People’s Projects: Herald Street,” White Columns, New York; and “Regarding Terror” Kunst-Werke, Berlin.

Scott King