Coming Soon: Nathaniel Rackowe at The Delfina Foundation

Nathaniel Rackowe- New works
26 March – 23 April 2010
Mon-Sat, 10:00 – 18:00 at The Delfina Foundation

Artist talk: Nathaniel Rackowe in conversation with Jon Wood (Henry Moore Institute): 8 April 2010, 19:00 - 20:00.

Produced during his residency in Beirut, Nathaniel Rackowe’s new works have developed from his growing appreciation of the architectural forms and structures of the city. His drawings and sculptures cohere to form a visual response to the environment created by modernist architecture, its subsequent failures and the aesthetics of regularity and repetition.

Nathaniel Rackowe’s architectural objects take their cue from the environment which they inhabit. Using motion and a palette of industrial supplies, his sculptures expand on scaffolding poles, asphalt, cinder blocks and corrugated iron as support structures for dazzling light sources. The resulting constructs conceal, as much as they sublime, the light they emit, and inform the legacy of chiaroscuro compositions with the formal vocabulary of industrial regeneration.

Beirut 1-15 is a series of duo-tone drawings with direct associations to changing urban landscapes, and referencing the colours of building works near the artist’s studio in Beirut. It depicts Modernist edifices isolated from any surrounding landscape that would give clues to their origins, inhabitants or use. The works evoke the dysfunction of vast, abandoned urban spaces, as the housing sites represented are darkened by the absence of life and the debris of passing time.

The deep blue corrugated roofing sheets that enwraps LP25 (Beirut) is common in both construction and temporary sheltering. The exterior surface and color dominate the piece, although its interior activity is also clearly visible, as light sources reveal the life within and the structure of the shell. With , Rackowe concentrates on the purity of color, material, form and volume. He draws particular attention to the viewer’s relationship to the object and its environment, by illuminating the space around the structure, and using light to define the perimeter of its containment.

Nathaniel Rackowe directs our attention to architecture, its ability to structure human actions and interactions. In these new works, Beirut and its connotations of failed utopianism provide context for Nathaniel’s ongoing exploration of the impossible space between the ideal and the built city.

Biographies

Nathaniel Rackowe (b. 1977) graduated from the Slade with a MFA in Sculpture. Since his graduation, Nathaniel has exhibited his work internationally including the ICA (London), The Economist Plaza (Contemporary Art Society, Bischoff/Weiss (London), Galerie Almine Rech (Paris), and Baibakov Art Projects (Moscow). Nathaniel has recently completed a Delfina Foundation residency in Beirut, Lebanon.

Jon Wood works at the Henry Moore institute, where he coordinates the academic research programme and curates exhibitions. 

Magic of Persia Residency awarded to Ala Dehghan

The Delfina Foundation and Magic of Persia are pleased to announce that Al Dehghan has been awarded the 2010 Magic of Persia Residency. 

Working in a very personal realm, Ala Dehghan's (b. 1982) small scale, mixed media drawings document her everyday rapport to the experiences that affect her mind and her life. Ala Dehghan graduated from Tehran University with an MA in Painting. She has recently exhibited at Thaddaeus Ropac (Paris), Silk Road Gallery (Tehran), and currently lives and works in Karaj, Iran.

Artist to artist 2010

Visiting Arts, in partnership with The Delfina Foundation, is delighted to announce the launch of Artist to Artist International 2010. Now in its sixth year, the scheme enables artists from the UK to invite artists from overseas for up to 2 weeks.  The selected overseas artist will spend a week with the UK artist, visiting their studio, meeting key contacts, networking and exchanging ideas. Participants will spend a week together from 8- 21st March 2010

The selected artists for 2010:

• Ali Cherri  will travel from Beirut, Lebanon  to work with London based visual and performance artist Robin Deacon 

• Delta Arts Collective will host Egypt based artist Doa Aly in Portsmouth 

• Visual Artists Volkan Aslan and Iz Oztat will make the same journey from Istanbul, spending time with Western Alliance members Rebecca Weeks and Steven Paige between, sharing time between London and Cornwall. 

• Christodoulos Panayiotou  will travel from Limassol, Cyprus to work with Celine Condorelli in London. 

Artist to Artist provides a unique opportunity to bring together pairs of artists to initiate dialogues across international borders. The structure of the programme is tailored by the artists themselves and puts the emphasis firmly on research and the exchange of ideas rather than production.
 
Artist to Artist is supported by Arts Council England and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

More information about Visiting Arts

Decolonizing Architecture Residency

The Delfina Foundation and Decolonizing Architecture are collaborating on a residency in Bethlehem, at the Decolonizing Architecture studio. Lorenzo Pezzani will be the first practitioner to take part in this project. The residency will be an opportunity for Lorenzo to gain intensive experience in practice lead research and spatial activism, within the conceptual frame of the studio, in one the world's most charged conflict areas.

A collaboration between architects Eyal Weizman, Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, Decolonizing Architecture arose from a need to open up an 'arena of speculation' about the future of Palestine, and to encourage both imaginative and practical planning about the areas that already have or will be liberated from direct Israeli control. The work of Decolonising Architecture has been exhibited internationally, including recent exhibitions at Palais des Beaux Arts, Bruxelles (BOZAR, 2009), the Venice Biennale for Architecture (2008), the 11th Istanbul Biennale (2009) and the Rotterdam International Biennale of Architecture (2009). More information about Decolonizing Architecture

Lorenzo Pezzani is a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths University’s Centre for Research Architecture. His practice-based research looks at how the afterlife of various buildings, monuments, migrant bodies and images could enhance, through profanation, the production of a new postcolonial ecology.