Graham Gillmore, Erik Parker
New words
15 February – 31 March
The exhibition “new words” brings together the work of two artists: Graham Gillmore and Erik Parker showing in London for the first time. Their common ground is to work in the same cultural environment: New York and the use of words and anthropomorphic references. These two languages are in fact used as a metaphor of today’s dynamics of imposition/assimilation and rejection that regulate our lives.
Graham Gillmore draws from our cultural inheritance names or quotations of philosophers and writers that have an established meaning in our memory, as well as of anonymous people, objects and codes of behaviour that belong to the everyday life of the metropolis. These names and words are engraved and distributed on the pictorial surface that is also marked by geometric forms and anthropomorphic architectures, with an ironic gesture that twist theirs original meanings and acquire a new one.
Erik Parker employs a strategy similar to genealogy charts. The paintings incorporate psychedelic colours, written snapshots, of particular time and space, framed by drawings of internal organs and bodily functions, which provides the work with an ironic epic quality. Popular and street culture, slang, elements from tagging and graffiti, names are retrieved and organized in an horizontal dimension that gives the same importance and existence. Parker speaking of his own work says: “I try to make paintings that look the way a hip-hop song sounds”. It is, in fact, through his “hip-hop” painting style that he depicts a tragic-comic vision of the future.