‘And yet delirium still prevails, the delirium of inwardness in public space, and in the contradictory idea that a painted image, despite its flatness, can still transport us.’ -Rachel Kushner

David Korty’s recent work portrays a stylistically complex space in which his calligraphic alphabet of pencil lines, paint strokes, and colour forms coalesce into dense, seamless compositions. The simple images of everyday life - women reading magazines, couples milling about, figures waiting in line, and a man surveying a botanical garden, betray the seeming mundanity of the subjects and reveal a kind of slow-burning introspection. The stillness of the figures and shapes in the paintings give way to a roving movement of the eye and hand.

A voracious curiosity that asks us to look closer at the things which are already in front of us. In these new paintings Korty adopts a more muted palette and elaborates organic form into geometric pattern. The painting Untitled (women at computers) (2007) uses tones of grey, blue and black, while other parts of the canvas are left bare. The viewer’s attention is drawn first to the foreground where a woman is conveyed using simple monochromatic line-work. The space behind her then becomes apparent, in which those elements are echoed and re-echoed like a repeating melody. The curved line that represents the first woman’s shoulder is repeated to form the distant figures behind her and the same line is then beguilingly inverted to create the curve in the first and second women’s hair. It is as if the motif were a letter being upended by a child who has discovered an “M” by inverting the letter “W”. Not to say that these paintings are overtly playful or carefree: a resolute sense of the “matter of fact” is evident throughout and whatever painterly technique is used, it remains subservient to the larger, more complex idea at hand.

David Korty was born in 1971 in California, United States of America. He lives and works in Los Angeles. His work has been exhibited widely, including the group shows: Painting Codes: I Codici della Pittura, Galleria Comunale d’Arte Contemporanea di Monfalcone, Monfalcone, Italy, 2006; Landscape Confection,The Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio, 2005; My Head is On Fire But my Heart is Full of Love, Charlottenburg Exhibition Hall, Copenhagen, 2004; Painting on the Move, Kunstmuseum Basel; Museum für Gegenwartskunst Basel; Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, 2002. To coincide with the exhibition a new book on the artist’s work featuring a text by Rachel Kushner will be published by Sadie Coles HQ, Michael Kohn Gallery and Koenig Books.

69 South Audley Street, London W1
Private View 02 April 6-8 pm

Sadie Coles HQ is presenting a major new series of paintings by American painter John Currin whose subjects range from the domestic to the overtly erotic. These exceptionally refined and gloriously engaging paintings continue the intense debate within Currin’s work that combines art historical technique with contemporary reference. While some of Currin’s new paintings are of flowers and exquisite china, most are depictions of hardcore eroticism taken from European pornography.

Pornography is functional and almost by definition an unembellished celluloid or digital idiom. Indeed, one of the primary uses of photography is porn, and a painting would struggle to claim to be as immediate or undeniably in the moment as a photograph.

Currin’s use of pornographic subject matter is both a challenge to these conventions and an acknowledgement of the spectral presence of photography for the contemporary painter. Currin renders the pornographic in luscious oil paint, evoking the technique of historical painters as various as the magisterial Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Gustave Courbet, Christian Schad or Otto Dix. Currin’s appropriation of daring images and their transformation through the medium of paint knowingly mimics the four-hundred-year-old practice of erotic paintings commissioned for private viewing by wealthy patrons. His imagery does away with the elevation of the subject through mythical role play and these girls and boys are what they are, 20th century porn stars, but they are promoted purely through their rendering in oil paint. And when the pictures are not explicit they are laced with innuendo. One picture in the exhibition, Pushkin Girl, depicts a plump young woman looking up from her book in order to gaze at the viewer, the expression on her face suggesting that something indecent may be going on outside the crop of the image. Another painting, a still life of delft china, is seen in this context as fetishistic and as dogged in its mastery as Currin’s rendering of the sex act.

From early on in his career Currin was known for his distinctive depictions of women of various ages and sizes – dour menopausal women, pretty young girls, buxom maidens – and men of dubious sexual ability, and he has been alternately spoken of in terms of mannerism, caricature, and conservatism. But throughout Currin’s compositions is a morphology of academic realism entwined with lively contemporary caricature, with the work allowed to triumph by the pure splendour and the staggering ability of his painting.

John Currin was born in Boulder, Colorado, in 1962 and obtained a B.F.A. from Carnegie Mellon University (1984) followed by a M.F.A. from Yale University (1986). He lives and works in New York. In 2003, a travelling exhibition of drawings was organised by the Des Moines Art Center and in the same year MoCA Chicago initiated a mid-career survey of his painting which travelled to the Serpentine Gallery, London and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. His work has also been included as part of What is Painting?- Contemporary Art from the Collection, MoMA- Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2007; Painting Now! - Back to Figuration, Kunsthal Rotterdam, 2007; In the Darkest Hour there may be light: works from Damien Hirst’s Murderme Collection, Serpentine Gallery, London, 2006. A major monograph on John Currin was published by Rizzoli in 2006.

Sadie Coles HQ off-site
53 Central Street London EC1
Private view 15 January 6 - 8pm

The final exhibition in our series at the off-site space in Clerkenwell is by American artist Keith Sonnier, and is curated by Clarissa Dalrymple.

Dis-Play is a spectacular installation work characteristic of Keith Sonnier’s innovations and controlled experiments in which light and space are treated as tactile materials rather than simply optical devices. Made of a range of materials such as foam, glass, strobes, ultraviolet tubes, and fluorescent pigments, Sonnier transforms Central Street into a throbbing, censorial den that engages all five senses. A re-staging of a piece from 1970, Dis-Play is one in a series of Sonnier’s complex explorations of material phenomenology, a convergence of technology,Modernist aesthetics and transcendentalism. Revisiting this work almost forty years on brings into sharp focus Sonnier’s role in the now accepted blurring of the distinction between painting and sculpture as well as highlighting the foundations he laid for the interdisciplinary practices that abound today.

Accompanying Dis-Play is a series of wall sculptures, examples of Sonnier’s pioneering work into sculpture-as-drawing in which he uses limited materials to create enormous visual presences. Sonnier has had a career-long practice of working in series, a process he sees as being essential to his creative energy and one that allows him to revisit his early forms and materials in order to manipulate and reinvent his form language. Included here are works from the 1960s File Series, as well as works from the mid-1990s Cohla Junction Series.

The name of the File Series refers to the altered shape of a nail emery board file, although the fabrication of the series focuses on the sensation of touch and utilizes old-fashioned upholstery techniques to dictate the forms. Mindful of the three decades of investigation into neon and light sculpture, the more recent Cohla Junction Series, while drawing on African or Aboriginal themes, is made up of non-objective works which focus on the integration of architectonic electrical housing and sculptural elements. Throughout, as seen in works from the Cat Doucet and Depose series from the mid-1990s, Sonnier’s roots in rural Louisiana play an important part in his work. The sculptures here relate directly to childhood themes as well as a perceived anthropomorphism in nature, their inflated forms suggestive of a type of figuration which seems to move in time and set up its own narrative descriptions.

Keith Sonnier (born 1941, Mamou, Louisiana) is a minimalist, performance, video and light artist. He emerged in the 1960s as part of a generation of sculptors that included Dan Flavin, Michael Heizer, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, and James Turrell, among others and was included in the seminal exhibition When Attitudes Become Form curated by Harald Szeemann for Kunsthalle Bern which travelled to the Institute of Contemporary Art London in 1969. Sonnier lives and works in New York. 

35 Heddon Street London W1
Private view 21 May 6 - 8pm

Frank Benson’s spring 2008 show at Sadie Coles HQ presents a series of refined presentations of pre-existing abstract forms, each one arrested in motion. Two of the sculptures replicate actual chocolate fountains, highly associative objects of desire and consumerism. Cast in stainless steel to maintain a material harmony with the object that inspired them, the fountains are polished to be almost inconceivably reflective. The apparent invitation to try and disturb their flow is overwhelming. But as with other work by Benson, such as Human Statue that was shown at the Serpentine last year, the pieces remain in the realm of the spectacle: these sculptures are static, abruptly frozen, always resisting the viewers intervention. With their repetitive geometric and iconic shape the reference to Constantin Brancusi is clear; their extreme and polished realism becomes entwined with a kind of universal abstraction. The illusion of fluidity in the fountains is echoed in the tables that support them. Concertina-like bases made of aerospace materials are a direct translation of Benson’s foam core maquettes and introduce space, air and upward motion to the closed and inert form of the fountain. The base turns the totemic monument of the chocolate fountain into an unstable phallus, something that asserts its masculinity at the same time as it risks its own demise.

The nonchalance of these sturdy bases is also found in two furled MDF pieces that are positioned on the floor. These works appear casual, as though they might flop back to their original form, but like the fountains their construction means that they are in fact the opposite. Made by means of a lengthy process in a furniture-making workshop involving jig construction, lamination and trimming, high levels of production as a means to the distillation of movement are as central to these pieces as in the chocolate fountains. Benson says ‘I enjoy backtracking through the manufacturing and distribution process which produces the readymade and intervening one or two steps before the object would become available to the public...’. Furthering the idea of manufacture, Benson has specifically made two of each sculpture in order to ‘suggest the possibility of multiple, if not infinite, variations on each form.’

Benson’s photographic works are similarly occupied with the suspension of movement in both the form and function of the object. The image that is part of this exhibition shows a halted multiple CD-changer, presented as an architectural monument, its functionality as bypassed as a Blossfeldt flower. In other photographs a foam-spraying can deposits its contents into the air, the nodular forms frozen, and a plastic party cup melts to form a plate but stops just short of losing functionality. Through this series of photographs, as with the other works in the show, Benson aspires ‘to force the viewer to form their own conclusions about each of the work’s state of being and acceptability as an art object.’

Frank Benson was born in 1976 in Virginia, USA. He studied at Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, and Master of Fine Arts, University of California, Los Angeles. His work was recently included in the world-touring Uncertain States of America - American Art in the 3rd Millennium curated by Daniel Birnbaum, Gunnar B. Kvaran and Hans Ulrich Obrist which came to the Serpentine Gallery last year.

35 Heddon Street, London W1

Sadie Coles is pleased to present TYPED, an exhibition of works all made on or in close relation to the typewriter. With its roots in a patent from 1714, the typewriter came into its own in the twentieth century as an indispensable tool for businesses and professional writers. A century characterised by a rise in the value of seeing and sight, the proliferation of cinema was one of the leading factors that emphasised the visual sign at the expense of all else, and introduced a radically new syntax. Not only was the word subordinated to the image, but also the way images were linked to words was often innovative and various.

The rise of the typewriter it seems was, in turn, a prelude to visual poetry and the typing machine became a favourite instrument for visual poets, notably in the Calligrammes by Guillaume Apollinaire and the poetry of writers such as E. E. Cummings and Ezra Pound. In the 1950s, the typewriter became a vital tool for the Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac typed On The Road on a single roll of paper, while in William S. Burrough’s Naked Lunch the machine is personified. Later, with the dematerialisation of the art object in the 1960s, artists adopted systems to organise or expedite their processes and the typewriter served as an ideal device for distancing the artist’s hand. 

The artists in TYPED use the typewriter in a myriad of ways. Some use it as a way of investigating language: works by Carl Andre form part of a long history in concrete poetry; Christopher Knowles’ obsessive works on paper using a 1980s electric typewriter involve idiosyncratic linguistics and simple designs; and Sue Tompkins layers and repeats words to sometimes hypnotic effect. Others capitalise on the virtual obsolescence of the tool: Frances Stark’s carbon copies of type by hand inadvertently invite blemish while Janice Kerbel’s love letters pay homage to the Underwood brand of the machine. In other instances the distinctly everyday typewriter font adds prosaic humour as in Lowe and Thomson’s ‘The Harang-Utang Letters 1993-1999’. Meanwhile, Dirk Krecker’s dense, figurative landscapes are like monitors fizzing and whirring, the creations of a techno-dandy. TYPED also includes other works by Richard Prince, Angela Bulloch, Douglas Gordon and Adam McEwen.

N. B. Opening hours Tuesday - Saturday 10-6

69 South Audley Street, London W1

For his third solo show at Sadie Coles HQ Angus Fairhurst presents a group of new sculptures and large-scale paintings. The new paintings are spatial schematics for imagined sites of desire. Occupied with the notion of terrain vague, the interstitial spaces that represent both disorder and opportunity in an urban environment that is increasingly standardized and regulated, Fairhurst imparts a belief in the potential of space while acknowledging its contested nature.  Incorporated into the paintings are advertising posters, of the type found in bus shelters and underground stations, with much of the information stripped away. Both violent and erotic, the spaces so created become gaps allowing transformation and fantasy.

The new sculptures are also concerned with the creation of and projection into space by means of gaps as material. One piece literally has the middle smashed out of it, a resin reproduction of a ‘To Let’ sign, a jagged outline framing vacant space. In contrast, made by means of building up, another work, a bronze cast of a moment of intimacy between a man and a tree, is an almost abstract composite of energetic gestures, layering and mashing: a counterpart coming into being. 

As in earlier work, Fairhurst incorporates found imagery from multiple sources, distancing himself from the work’s elements at the same time as he fuses them, the handmade mark as discernible as the mechanical. All of the new pieces are innately connected, idiomatic fluctuations between themes of space, desire, creativity, destruction and renewal. With material from advertising and art history, Fairhurst plays on iconographic congruities between the two, presenting a complex composition of interior and exterior worlds.

Angus Fairhurst was born in 1966 in Kent, England.  He lives in London, England. His work has been exhibited widely including as part In the darkest hour there may be light: Works from Damien Hirst’s Murderme Collection, Serpentine Gallery, London, 2006; In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, Tate Britain, London, 2004; Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis, Tate Modern, London, 2001; The Anagrammatical Body, Neue Landesmuseum, Graz, Austria; Brilliant, Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, 1995; as well as the seminal Freeze, PLA Building, London; 1988. Solo shows include one at Spacex Gallery, Exeter, 2001; More or Less Angus Fairhurst, Sadie Coles HQ, London, 2001; This Does Not Last More Than Ten Seconds, Kunsthalle St Gallen, Switzerland, 2001; and The Missing Link, Sadie Coles HQ, London, 1998.  A new book on the artist’s work, with texts by Sasha Craddock and Harland Miller will be published in the late spring 2008 by Phillips.

For further information or images please contact Julia Holdway on +44 [0] 20 7434 2227 or

N.B. opening hours Tuesday – Saturday 11am – 6pm

Christiana Soulou: Selected Drawings

Futura, Athens, 2006
£10.00

35 Heddon Street, London W1
For his third show at Sadie Coles HQ, American artist JP Munro presents an ambitious collection of new paintings. In his work, Munro reinterprets myths and legends, many of which have been previously realised by canonical artists such as Titian, Delacroix, and Moreau.

With epic overtones and elaborate costumes, Munro’s work is often spoken about in terms of the cinematic, more specifically film posters, at once telling all and none of the story. Film posters possess a ceremonial air that find echo in the intensity of detail and complexity of composition found in Munro’s works.
Endowed with a distinctively contemporary edge, Munro’s paintings border on pastiche, and it quickly becomes apparent that, although of undeniable interest, it is not so much the subject matter composed of derivative themes that counts, but rather how it provides, in the artist’s own words, ‘a way into moving coloured pigment around.’

Thematically, Munro’s new pieces do not mark a significant departure, but rather there is a shift in his use of colour. His palette here is darker, richer, and while the works depict episodes that have taken place across various centuries and continents, they are aesthetically unified by tone. The fiery reds applied in the Battle of Cadore accentuate the scene’s gritty violence and durable presence and it is exemplary of the way in which the artist works. Taking a painting by Italian Renaissance painter Titian entitled The Battle of Spoleto that was lost in a fire in 1577, Munro, intrigued by the idea of ‘a battle on a bridge’, fuses elements of Titian’s own drawings with copies of the painting by the Old Master’s contemporaries as well as his own personal impressions. Incredibly congested, this panorama contrasts with his depiction of the Biblical story the Temple of Solomon.  Munro shows Israel’s first house of the Lord as a depleted yet affluent place with a gold interior archway and ornate surroundings.  Starting with visual symbols from freemasonic structures the artist then combines them with knowledge from archive drawings and diagrams, to create an ominous yet enticing entrance.  Meanwhile Heracles in the Garden of the Hesperides captures the moment before Heracles is to slain the serpent.  The scene beholds an overall feeling of stillness and containment and yet is still ill at ease as all four Hesperides are turned towards Heracles aghast at what will happen next.

JP Munro was born in 1975 in Inglewood, California.  He lives in Los Angeles, California.  His work has been exhibited widely including as part of the Whitney Biennial 2006: Day for Night, New York, and at the ICA, London, 2004.

69 South Audley Street, London W1
For one month Sadie Coles HQ will be filled with FILMS. The exhibition presents an expanded notion of film and is a celebration of this exceptionally diverse and detailed medium, beloved of artists, now being superseded by new digital technologies.

Works will be shown on a variety of formats, specifically 35mm slides, video, 8mm and
16mm film. Each week will showcase work by a different artist:

Sarah Lucas
Sausage Film, 1990, Betacam SP
The first and only film by Lucas is the epitome of her confrontational style: the artist saucily skins, slices and eats a sausage and a banana.
Thursday 17 – Saturday 19 January

TJ Wilcox
The Death and Burial of the First Emperor of China, 1997, 16mm
‘It was in the ‘70s that they found this tomb. It was guarded by these terracotta warriors and now they have found ten thousand of them...’
Tuesday 22 - Saturday 26 January

Jim Lambie
Ultralow, 1998, Beta SP Video
A metronome for our darker hours…
Tuesday 29 January – Saturday 02 February

Wilhelm Sasnal
Kodachrome, 2006, Super-8 film
Europa, 2007, 16mm film
These two films by Sasnal focus on the medium itself, one using just text and soundtrack to describe a classic movie scene, the other a homage to Kodachrome and its place in 20th century history.
Tuesday 05 – Saturday 09 February

Hilary Lloyd
Princess Julia Slide Projection, 1997, 35mm slides
Lloyd’s first slide projection shows Princess Julia journeying to and from work.
Tuesday 12 – Saturday 16 February

N.B. Opening hours Tuesday – Saturday 11am – 6pm

Christopher Wool:
Ophiuchus Collection,

Sadie Coles HQ,
London, 1998
£ 8.00

Studio International: Paintings from the Ophiuchus Collection

Sadie Coles HQ,
London, 2001
£ 5.00