The Summer Show at Sadie Coles HQ presents editions by five of the gallery’s artists: John Currin, Sarah Lucas, Angus Fairhurst, Urs Fischer and Elizabeth Peyton.
John Currin’s exquisitely worked series of seven etchings, Milestones, 2006, are based on a selection of paintings spanning the artist’s career to date, and exemplify the artist’s skill in this technique and in depicting the figure in a variety of twisted circumstances. Many of the etchings ooze mischievous humour: a scantily-dressed ‘hobo’, with strappy platform sandals and a pack on her back, smiles mysteriously as she is surrounded by fat snow-flakes. In another, a doctor crouches rather forcefully on a doctor’s stool, brandishing a stethoscope toward the patient hidden by a screen, over which a bra dangles suggestively. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Currin depicts the pathos of a woman seemingly forced into her bed, staring fixedly into the space above her.
Sarah Lucas’s portfolio, Self Portraits 1990-1998, 1999 brings together her decade of iconic self-portraits. In Self Portrait with Skull Lucas challenges the viewer with her open-legged pose and intense gaze, while a skull grins from its position between her outspread boots, addressing at once the subjects of death, authorship and gender stereotyping. These themes are picked up and reconsidered, as Lucas defies and embraces slang descriptions of the human body, deploying the sharp wit that characterizes so much of her work.
In Elizabeth Peyton’s new prints, 2004-06 she portrays a beautifully majestic Georgia O’Keefe, a young kaftan-wearing Ozzy Osbourne, Marc Jacobs and a red hot Julian Casablancas caught in action with the Strokes. Peyton experiments with a range of printing techniques to quite different painterly effect. All the works share the sincerity and compassion that characterize her paintings and drawings.
In a series of three works, each titled Unprinted, 2005-06 Angus Fairhurst extends into print recent collages using layered magazine advertisements with the figures and text removed. In so doing he subverts the original appearance and intent of these images, and creates new semi-abstract forms in the process.
Thinking about Störtebeker, 2005 Urs Fischer’s portfolio of prints, brings together edgily funny and brazen imagery to create bizarre visual puns. Combining drawings, collage and digital editing, Fischer’s prints depart from the usual expectations of space, scale and context. In one print, lips open to reveal an eye, around whose edge smoke flows; in another a table casts the elongated shadow of a wooden garden chair; another shows a middle-aged Fischer holding a cat the size of a lion. The juxtapositions within the group capture Fischer’s characteristic trait of making unexpected images whose cleverly worded titles offer an additional layer of meaning.
