Something Less Something More
March 20 - May 20 2008

111 Great Titchfield Street London W1W 6RY

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Something Less, Something More draws together works from 14 International artists and is the second in a series of exhibitions at Gallery One One One, featuring works from the David Roberts collection. Gallery One One One is the current home of the David Roberts Foundation.

Something Less, Something More borrows its title from a 2002 work by the French artist Pierre Bismuth. Writing about his neon work Coming Soon (2005), in his monographic catalogue, Bismuth declares “I thought it was interesting to produce a piece that would have a very strong materiality, but that would make you feel that the work is about something else that is not here yet.” Taking Bismuth’s statement as a starting point, this exhibition explores the use of objects and ready-mades in some recent works from the David Roberts collection.

The exhibiting artists are: Bettina Allamoda, Bertozzi & Casoni, Pierre Bismuth, Oliver Clegg, Martin Creed, Elmgreen & Dragset, David Ersser, Neil Gall, Tatsuya Kimata, Simon Linke, Nate Lowman, Donald Moffett, Michael Lisle Taylor, Manuela Ribadaneira

By using either found objects or elements, the artists in this show draw on the legacy of Marcel Duchamp to challenge and re-interpret minimalist and conceptual strategies. This leads either to the commissioning of newly manufactured objects in a minimalist manner or the creation of facsimiles of existing objects in a more direct readymade influenced tactic. In many of the works on show the artist’s gesture is unclear to deliberately raise questions about the objects: are they fake, produced, conceived, displaced or found? Production modes are at the core of the works in this exhibition. Displacing the artistic gesture calls into question the art work as commodity. In some of the works on show social, economic and political issues are raised that often have a disenchanted yet humorous relationship to the world.

Artists included in Something Less, Something More:

Bettina Allamoda (born 1964, USA): Bettina Allamoda uses a wide range of media to address what role art should play in forming our environment. Referring to her work as ‘archaeology of the present’ she collects and collages found objects and images to explore the boundaries between ‘objects of art’ and ‘objects for use’.

Bertozzi & Casoni (born 1957 and 1961, Italy): In their highly realistic signature style, Bertozzi & Casoni have crafted ceramic sculptures (by hand) which reflect a fascination with decay. The intertextual reference to Andy Warhol’s Brillo Pad exemplifies a use of irony and humour in their work. The works are positioned in the space between fine art and craft, artwork and product, ornament and object.

Pierre Bismuth (born 1963, France): Oscar-winner (2004) Pierre Bismuth is fascinated with disruption and translation. His work, be it video, works on paper or installation, is exemplary of post-conceptual strategy. He often plays with viewers’ expectations by a free use of common cultural codes such as the teaser borrowed from cinema’s industry: Coming Soon.

Oliver Clegg (born 1980, UK): Taking children’s toys and dolls as his subject matter, painted on decaying boards that are heavily laden with marks, Clegg embraces the nostalgic sense of memory and loss that is inherent within them.

Martin Creed (born 1968, UK): Turner Price winner (2001) Martin Creed’s subtle alterations of everyday objects are emotionally charged. He transforms common objects and gives them new meanings that disrupt our assumptions about the world and our apprehension of time.

Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset (born 1961 and 1969, Denmark and Norway): “Any structure can be altered, exchanged or interchanged”: since their series of installations and sculptures called powerless structures the two artists have been working with space and its multiple meanings. Their work questions notions of power that lie behind any use of space: mental, social, architectural, public etc.

David Ersser (born 1976, UK): David Ersser carves seemingly cold, meticulous reproductions of everyday objects including hi-fi equipment, bicycle, neon signage, etc. Lifeless and slightly wonky, his facsimiles criticise notions of value and work while reinterpreting the tradition of the trompe l’œil in the lineage of George Segal, Richard Artschwager and Jeff Koons.

Neil Gall (born 1967, UK): Neil Gall’s paintings are the final stages of a layered working process: from modelling to assemblage, photography and painting. Gall starts by creating sculptures made from spheres of wrapped tape, fluffy balls, blobs of plasticine and mangled wire. He then paints them in a photorealist style, blurring the definition of the depicted object, between found or created images.

Tatsuya Kimata (born 1980, Japan): Tatsuya Kimata transforms everyday objects such as socks and cups into beautifully carved objects in marble. He is concerned with the baroque beauty that can be found in the most mundane objects, infusing his work with an extreme tension between his skills as a sculptor, the artistic value of the material used (white marble) and the objects carved.

Simon Linke (born 1958, Australia): In 1986 Simon Linke started to make paintings of the Ed Ruscha designed advertisement pages of Artforum. His paintings of glossy art publicity stress the materiality of the painting and at the same time testify to art interrogations of the contextual, critical, economical and hierarchical structures of the art world.

Nate Lowman (born 1979, USA): Nate Lowman is known for his appropriation of bumper stickers, news media, posters and graffiti to generate a critique of consumption, celebrity cults and American culture. He often merges the codes of street culture (stickers, graffiti) with the codes of high art (the round canvas: the tondo) in works which defy fixed definitions.

Donald Moffett (born 1955, USA): Donald Moffett is known for his richly textured monochromatic paintings, punctured with holes or cut open and re-sealed with zippers. Exploring the legacy of minimalism and abstraction, Moffett twists formal traditions and interrogates the potential of his medium by treating the surface like skin that can be ceremonially pierced, sliced and sutured.

Michael Lisle Taylor (born 1969, Wales): The sculptural work exists both as relic - remains of an event, be it actual or imagined - and as an emotionally charged object in itself. Lisle Taylor’s political work is brutally honest, almost overburdened with meaning and history.

Manuela Ribadaneira (born 1966, Ecuador): Manuela Ribadaneira’s installations revolve around the notions of territory and boundary. Often performative, sometimes violent, her work can be situated in the lineage of Valie Export, Gordon Matta-Clark or Hans Haacke. The installation in the gallery gained the artist attention at the Venice Biennale in 2007, where she represented Ecuador.

Vincent Honore