2004-12-10 | Former Thami Mnyele Foundation artist Samson Kambalu featured in article in The Guardian
Former Thami Mnyele Foundation artist Samson Kambalu featured in article by Adrian Searle in The Guardian about new talent in the British art scene.
Link: www.guardian.co.uk/arts/newbritishtalent/story/0,,1362667,00.html
Tuesday November 30, 2004
The Guardian
New British artists: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Bedwyr Willams, Matt Calderwood, Samson Kambalu, Ian Kiaer, Nobuko Tsuchiya and Andrew Grassie. Photo: Eamonn McCabe
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
Age: 27
What she does: Yiadom-Boakye, a Londoner of Ghanaian descent and a graduate last year from the Royal Academy Schools, has three paintings in this year's New Contemporaries, another in the John Moores biannual exhibition and yet more in an international group show at the Mannheim Kunsthalle in Germany. Her portraits are a cast list of grinning Grammy winners, a self-satisfied towel-robed hunk, a ditzy middle-aged woman, comfortable in her body and with a shocking red bra. But the paintings aren't merely humorous black stereotypes. They are painted with a loose and disbelieving swagger that seems to comment both on the characters of her subjects and what we might want from portraiture in the first place.
She says: "I like the decadence of oil paint. I like decadence in general. I wanted to paint the person that soul singers have written love poetry for, or the type that missionaries would like to teach. In the end, the history and act of painting is what matters."
We say: Seeing Yiadom-Boakye's work for the first time was like a punch in the stomach. Her paintings have a raw edginess, but a lot of sophistication and complications in them. And complications are the best thing a young artist can have.
Bedwyr Williams
Age: 30
What he does: Williams, a winner of this year's Paul Hamlyn award, and artist-in-residence at next year's Venice Biennale, lives outside Caernarfon in north Wales. He mines the territory of Welshness and provincial life. In 2003, he set up the Blenau Vista Social Club in the back of a caravan, and his recent show in Cardiff represented the cultural collision of model railway enthusiasts and snooker players. He wants to hit golf balls through a harp, while wearing plus-fours, which, he says, are an excuse for white people to dress up like pimps.
He says: "My work is a mixture of performance and video - I don't like looking at it but I like doing it. The English can't step back from themselves, but as a bilingual Welshman I can. I built a Teasmade that drowned a Welsh village in tea every morning. It represented the building of reservoirs in Wales to provide the water for England."
We say: Williams strikes a blow for anti-metropolitanism. He'll be coming across the border soon if we're not careful. For all his buffoonery, he is truly inventive and his art makes a very serious point.
Matt Calderwood
Age: 29
What he does: It is night. A streetlamp illuminates the snow beneath. The artist wanders on to the scene, climbs the lamppost and disappears from view. There's a slight metallic sound, as he unscrews the bulb and the light goes out. End. Matt Calderwood undoubtedly follows Wittgenstein's dictum: "One must, so to speak, pull up the ladder." His sometimes life-threatening videos, which he has been making since 1998, are as much about sculpture and the material conditions of the world, as they are related to performance or film, and are as scary as they are funny.
He says: "I get queasy thinking about and showing what I've done. The first time I've done some things I've thought, 'Will it work or will it kill me?' It is impossible to rehearse my pieces. In 2000 I videoed myself climbing a ladder, chopping out the rungs beneath me with an axe as I went. My work has what you could call an escape vibe."
We say: I have watched Calderwood's videos and thought to myself, "Please don't do that." You question whether these things are art - but they also have a lovely, physical poetic grace.
Samson Kambalu
Age: 29
What he does: Kambalu's art is a reflection on his origins and education, and the relationship between Europe and Africa. Born in Malawi, he moved to Nottingham in 2000, after working in the Netherlands. Following his marriage to a Scot, the former lecturer began work on How to Get a British Passport - a literary narrative, artwork and portrait of the artist as young man. His recent exhibition in Nottingham, Holyballism, included footballs covered in the pages of the Bible, and was accompanied by a manifesto in which he wrote: "I am developing an expressionist art form called Holyballism, centred on the Holyball, a football covered with the pages of the Holy Bible ... My vision is that in the future all Holy Books of the world will be made into Holy Balls exercising and exorcising people into everlasting happiness." He recently won a Decibel award for black and Asian artists.
He says: "I became an artist at the age of seven in an arithmetic class. When I first came to Europe people asked me what is African art - and I showed them the Bible. What is Rothko in Africa, who is Warhol? Yet I'm also an African who grew up with MTV and football. Both the Bible and football are lowest common denominators. In any case, Christianity appropriated the Roman cross, so why not appropriate a football?"
We say: Neitzsche, continental philosophy, football, post-colonialism and lapsed faith are a heady stew, and Kambalu wants to use all of them. My head spins, full of words, just like one of those balls.
Ian Kiaer
Age: 32
What he does: Rather than sculpture, Kiaer refers to his works as models. Trained at the Royal College of Art as a painter, he is influenced by the architectural models and the radical 19th-century theatre designs of Frederick Keisler. Kiaer creates small worlds from blocks of polystyrene, rubber, plastic bowls and soiled cardboard boxes. A rubber bladder from inside a football beside little cubes of tinfoil makes you think of pigeons pecking underfoot in a city - but the cubes could also be houses, the bladder a giant boulder. At the last Venice Biennale Kiaer's work was partially destroyed by a cleaner who mistook his models for rubbish left lying about.
He says: "I went to Seoul in Korea and stepped into the void, in this city where everything seemed contingent, fast, temporary. My works have something of the same feel. Models can be illusionistic, utopian, diagramatic - I like the idea that one can move from one language to another, always enlarging one's repertoire."
We say: Kiaer's is an art of transformation and contingencies. His interests are focused on what it is like to live in cities, and how we find meaning in the confusion of stuff around us, both as theatre and as a labyrinth of meanings at every scale.
Nobuko Tsuchiya
Age: 32
What she does: Japanese artist Nobuko Tsuchiya came to London in 2001 and has been showing at Anthony Reynolds Gallery since completing a postgraduate course at Goldsmith's College. She makes alarming, delicate sculptures with titles such as Insect Surgery Machine, Catheter and Parking Fish Project, using old chair frames, saucepans and whisks, dismantled lamps and what looks like hi-tech medical detritus. Her highly wrought agglomerations have an air of lab experiments, yet they are also images, their titles leading us to view the work in relation to the body, to animal behaviour, to sexuality. Although she shows in Japan, she has no plans to leave London.
She says: "Not everything is as it appears in my work, not everything is done on purpose. My decisions are made by using what you could call a different form of thinking, and are made to operate between harmony and discord, control and the lack of it. I always try to develop the conversation between the things in my work and myself. Maybe this sounds idiotic, but it is my honest feeling."
We say: There is nothing idiotic about Tsuchiya's art, even if one cannot always understand quite what it is about. Maybe that's part of the point. Her "different form of thinking" and quietly dramatic feel for her materials result in works that are at once threatening and beguiling. Part of me dreads to think what she'll do next.
Andrew Grassie
Age: 38
What he does: After leaving St Martins, Edinburgh-born Grassie spent years not knowing what sort of painter to be, until he got out all his old work, photographed it and started painstakingly copying the photos. He paints only about 15 works a year, mostly very small scale. He won a prize at this year's John Moores exhibition for a depiction of his studio, where he made the painting, which can be seen propped on his desk. Next year he has a show at the Tate's Art Now room, for which he will paint a "virtual show" of works from the Tate.
He says: "The question for me has always been what to paint. My early works went from style to style, they were sad testaments to ambition. I reached a point where I thought, what's the point of painting another picture? Turning the question to my advantage, I turned to blind copying. I'm also fascinated by the fact that what you see is like reality but not."
We say: We look at Grassie's paintings with much the same concentration that he spent in making them. His art is like being trapped by your reflection in a mirror, caught in some fixating loop. There's a sly subplot about art and narcissism here that is hypnotic and disturbing.