.
New Art Projects is set to return (at last) to open what we’re told will be a new project space and show room. We had been expecting Fred and his team to surface again back in the spring after the closing of that much loved Hackney space back at the end of last year – ORGAN THING: Fred Mann’s New Art Projects is on the move, there’s been a lot of good art in their Hackney space, here’s a quick celebration of some of those fine shows…
“Over the last fifteen years Fred Mann has developed a consultancy business that deals in discrete private sales at the top of the International Art Market. This work has included sales to museums and private collectors of paintings, drawings, sculpture and decorative arts.
After a period of re-adjustment and re-evaluation Fred is delighted to announce that he is re-opening New Art Projects as a private dealership and project space at: New Art Projects, Ground Floor, 357 City Road, London, EC1V 1LR Consultancy has become the backbone of New Art Projects’ business and it has enabled Fred to provide exhibition and publication opportunities to artists in his gallery spaces. In this same spirit he will continue to provide opportunities at 357 City Road. Situated in the grand drawing rooms of a listed 18th century house, these new project spaces will provide a perfect showcase for his continuing series of solo and group exhibitions. They will provide a base for his stable of represented artists as well as a publishing office for his continuing series of artists’ monographs and exhibition catalogues. In addition to these rooms the adjoining warehouse space will provide private viewing rooms and storage for Fred’s work with clients on a by appointment basis”
The Inaugural show at the new space begins on October 12th and will runs until December 17th 2023. There’s a two nighr private view weekend October 14/15th 11am until 6pm featuring Charles Williams, Phil King and Jesse Wiedel
“If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.” Theresa MayHistorically, being a non-Republican state, colonial Britain had subjects rather than citizens. Time of course stumbles on, as do stubborn common-sense habits and laws. Rather than an encyclopaedic ambition to make sense of any of this, the three painters in this show simply manifest the edges of contemporary life’s manifold circuses. It might be easy to dismiss their works as mere carnivalesque drollery, but no, weighty realism insists within the uncomfortable levity. Here, laughter is a form of self-defence and masks (thereby revealing) actual vulnerabilities; real subjectivities are invented.
The American painter Jesse Wiedel lives and works in Eureka, California, and his paintings develop a dystopian nightmare vision of countercultural breakdown in that rural habitat of drug victims, just about inhabiting sickly religious and other mad delusions. Aliens and alienation stalk the land on BMX bikes ridden by prematurely aged methamphetamine visionaries. Entropic sourness infects his paintwork – there is no ‘outside’ to this sprawling hopeless habitat, which indeed feels theologically cosmic in scope.
Charles Williams might seem to hail from somewhere far away from such enervated horror and bad survival strategies, and yet even in one of England’s home counties, sun blasted Kent, there is infection underlying the relative NHS guaranteed gentility. Freakishness rears its head in the form of Williams’ odd animals, hinting at a kind of queasy animation, all treated with Delacroix-like painterly mastery that only adds to the incongruity. Williams is developing into a master colourist and yet, rather than decadent aristocratic Shakespearian and Orientalist romantic fantasies from lost empires, his eye is cast on local subjects. He doesn’t resist his caricaturist eye – the graphic crudities of Gillray and Rawlinson insist from beyond the 19th century, despite the refined paint passages that he expertly deploys.
Phil King ranges far and wide, a reluctant world citizen, and he too presents populations – half recognisable personages – paintings as leftover bits and pieces of grand projects. Dysfunctional crowds, (he painted a morbid Question Time audience artificially populated by deadly red-faced right-wing goons sitting uncomfortably alongside late great artists etc). He is currently struggling with a painting of the 2020 Cheltenham Racecourse crowd as the spread of deadly contagion in that officially sanctioned mass spreading event took hold. King’s work is a kind of history painting defined by partial, fragmentary, sensibilities. Horatio Nelson effigies and half recognizable film stars rub shoulders. His is an art of lookalikes and yet sometimes even that definition dissolves in painterly blur.
It might all seem to take the horrible and the awfully failing as humorous motif and thereby to stroll inappropriately beyond the pale, but participation in sanguine realism is not only a form of resistance but is also hopefully empowering, and these painters (both citizens and subjects) are great exemplars of it – while simply offering us unlikely ‘good paintings’. Phil King 2023
Previously
THE ORGAN 
Leave a comment