FUGUE – KATE DUNN X ROBERT COOPER
P.V: 10th of June 2021
18:30 – 21:00
11th – 13th of June 2021
12:00 – 18:00
2 Broadway Market Mews
E8 4TS
Fugue
Music
a contrapuntal composition in which a short melody or phrase (the subject) is introduced by one part and successively taken up by others and developed by interweaving the parts.
Psychiatry
A loss of awareness of one’s identity, often coupled with a flight from one’s usual environment associated with certain forms of hysteria and epilepsy.
(Origin: fugue definition, Google search)
Lost in hysteria their marks and sounds repeated in the hopes to reach a melody. Giggling schoolgirls bouncing up and down, their mouths mutating into hyenas jaws. Circling each other, they daisy chain their hands, their arms become swift gestures and their feet are lost to pink.
This is where we find ourselves, lost in pink, emotional instability caused by blackout, laughing or crying, a state of extreme emotion, opera rose. Taking the first breath of out-of-lockdown air, mescaline green, attempting a touch again, tender lilac.
This show came out of a series of drawings crits that took place at Kate’s studio. Robert would arrive in the morning, they would draw all day and critique the work in the early evening. At first timid, they drew with a curtain between them, over time the curtain came down, the music grew louder and their marks began to imitate each other.
Kate’s work was concerned with digital intimacy: when using digital aesthetics how close can we actually get? What does it feel like to exist in a digital state, how do colour and expression equate through such a medium, and what does this look like when returned to the physicality of the studio. The colours steal from the oversaturation of the screen. The marks imitate those left by our fingers after a session of scrolling.
Robert’s work came from a desire to eradicate screens from his work and make something quickly and instinctually. What emerged was a language of motion, speed and colour inspired by life in a throbbing global metropolis. Visualised as animals, his characters slip in and out of abstraction as if refracted through a skyscrapers window or the windscreen of a speeding car.
Fugue presents a series of drawings, paired to display the relationship of imitation and communication that took place in the studio when the work was made. Although stylistically distinct, both artist’s work questions how colour, space and motion might appear when bursting from the flat plane of a screen. The music accompanying the exhibition is a digital fugue composed and performed by Inigo Blue and Rory Storm.
91 Lower Clapton Road
All frames made by FRMD, London. E5 0NP
