Here is a selection of featured artists from Mould Map 6 — Terraformers.
2 September 2016
Terraformers opens in two weeks’ time. Starting from today – we’ll be showcasing a selection of the 40+ artists and designers involved. First up is Mould Map regular, Viktor Hachmang:
“The woodblock prints of Edo-era Japan depict a floating world, closed off to foreign influence. By contrast, while often informed by the formal elements of these masterpieces, the graphic world of Viktor Hachmang is anything but closed, drawing lessons from and gleefully combining visual vocabularies spanning the boundaries of time and space.
His skill as an illustrator lies in an ability to synthesize these references with succinct visual communication. His energy as an artist flows from the sense of universal human experience and culture his imagery invokes – at once contemporary but timeless – how does he do that?” – Hugh Frost, April 2015
Here is Hachmang’s contribution to Mould Map 5 — Black Box:
Visit Viktor Hachmang’s Website
5 September 2016
With a background in traditional graffiti writing as member of the PAL crew (going under the name Mosa), Alexandre Bavard has expanded his practice to include video and performances pieces and large-scale airbrush paintings similar to distant galaxies – and frequently reappearing as Mosa in a silk hood with sunglasses on top.
See more of Alexandre’s work here.
Follow Mosa on Instagram, here.
6 September 2016
Today’s featured Terraformers artist is Paris-based Antwan Horfee. Horfee, like Alexandre Bavard, is a graffiti writer and artist based in Paris. Pushing away from letters and tags, Horfee’s studio practice carries the same signature style, but pulls in observations and cultural reflections – giving the viewer a glimpse into the world as he sees it. See more of Horfee’s work here.
Daniel Swan is a visual artist who creates often creates worlds in the form of animations – producing music videos for Jam City, RL Grime, Django Django, and more – as well as exhibiting work in a gallery setting.
Swan’s animations are built up around slick, futuristic worlds, which gradually shift and change throughout the song to create very distinct moods:
Although a little different from the majority of his work, this found footage montage / mashup is well worth the watch – combining clips from well known movies to create a completely new universe and story:
See more of Daniel’s work on their website.
8 September 2016
C.F. is a cartoonist (and musician) best known for his comic series Powr Mastrs, which weaves together complex characters and bizarre story lines in a deceptively simple looking drawing style – all set in the fantasy world of “New China”.
9 September 2016
Ed Fornieles (b.1983, UK) makes work that charts the osmosis between online and offline realities. His role-play driven scenarios explore the psychology of behaviour and limits of subjectivity. Fornieles uses a Fox persona that smudges the line between fantasy and reality – a cartoon character who channels the artist’s point of view as well as operating as the face of his practice via Fornieles’s Instagram account.
12 September 2016
G. W. Duncanson is a native of New York. Along with a dozen self-manufactured limited edition art books, his work has been published by Kniv Komix out of Copenhagen, Tiny Masters out of Leipzig, Kuš! in Latvia, and by Landfill Editions in the United Kingdom. His work has been published and exhibited extensively in the United States most notably by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in their Best American Comics of 2014 where it stands as an exemplar of avant-garde picture story.
Along with being a creator, Duncanson organizes and acts as public relations officer for Brooklyn’s Ditko! Exclamation ‘zine library housed at the not-for-profit arts space The Silent Barn and co-curates the PaperJam Festival, its associated bi-annual small press event.
See more at their website.
Mould Map 6 opens this Saturday (between 10 am – 3 pm), and we can’t wait! Stay tuned for more updates throughout this week.
14 September 2016
Hannah Bays is a painter (b. London, 1982) who studied at the Royal Academy Schools. Interested in human drives and the construction of meaning in our lives, recent work has focused on desire – both as motivational force and something also open to manipulation. Bays’s work has a Pop lineage yet is insistent also on spontaneous painterly gesture, or ‘affirmation’. Colour is used seductively yet often to the brink of nausea. There is a push and pull between the abstract and figurative, the symbolic and the purely formal, with a personal iconography including elements such as plasters and puncture repair kits.
Bays has work in the Jerwood, Hiscox and Soho House collections, was awarded a Jerwood Purchase Prize in 2014 and the Agnes Ethel Mackay travel award in 2015.
See more on their website.
Jacob Ciocci is a US-based artist, most well known as a member of art collective Paper Rad (2001-2008). His work is concerned with the relationships between popular culture, technology and notions of transcendence. In his paintings, comics, performances, net art and videos, contemporary and recently forgotten cultural symbols confront one another inside a frenzied cartoon universe that is simultaneously celebratory and critical.
See more on their website.
Alan Kitching and Monotype: Celebrating Five Pioneers of the Poster opens in just under 3 week’s time! Ahead of the opening, Alan sat down with LeftLion to discuss the origins of the exhibition, the changes in design over the last century, and what it takes to stand out as a designer – plus much more…
You originally showed this exhibition in 2014, where did the concept come from?
In 2013 I was invited to New York by Monotype and Eye Magazine as part of a week of seminars, talks and things, and Monotype asked me to participate in one of their publications. I told them that I don’t do books but I’d do a series of sheets folded up in to a slip case, and they agreed to that. When I got back to London I had to think of what to do. My girlfriend then was Naomi Games, the daughter of Abram Games, the English poster artist. She had written about her father extensively, and in her latest book the very first sentence said that when he was born in 1914 there were four other designers born in the same time: Paul Rand in America, Josef Müller-Brockmann in Switzerland, Tom Eckersley in Britain, FHK Henrion in Germany. They were all were very influential and important graphic designers, all born in the same year, and they more or less all died around the same time.
So, for the Monotype publication – 2014, when we published this series, it was their centenary – I invented five monograms based on their initials to go on the sheets, and this is where the idea for the exhibition came from. Although they were all graphic designers, they all did very different work and I based the monographs on their style of design. On the other side of the sheets was a little biography, and that’s also part of the exhibition. The rest of the exhibition is the work that these five guys did – posters, books and whatever to show the background of what they did and where they came from, to make more sense of my monograms.
Graphic design, and typography – like all art, goes through fashions. Do you have a favourite period?
Rand, Eckersley and Games and so on, they were artist designers, if you like. And it changed, the whole thing got more commercial, so by the time the sixties arrives, new designers came along. I was brought up in the design of the sixties which was Fletcher Forbes Gill, and Derek Birdsall. They were the hot shot designers when I first came to London – the scene had started to change. Graphic design wasn’t what it is now. The clients were different, they were more of a commodity and used in corporate ways. Now it’s almost come to its conclusion but then it was still in an embryonic stage. There were very individual styles, you could recognise their work, it had a very distinctive touch to it whereas nowadays it’s very difficult to know immediately who’s done something.
Can you pinpoint what it is in a designer/their work that elevates them to something more than the standard?
It is difficult. To go back a bit. The designers I knew – Birdsall, Fletcher, Gill – they were all very well-read people. They were intelligent. They were very smart. They were bright. … You have to have a certain amount of intelligence to do design, you have to be well-versed in all sorts of levels of knowledge. The good designers have got that, they can draw on references – they know about music, literature, all sorts of things which they can pull on and make connections with. This shows in people’s work.
It’s not just a question of being good at visual manipulation of images anymore, you have to understand the background to it all. … An American artist called Ben Shann … did wonderful lettering, he used Hebrew letters and Arabic letters, and all his lettering is kind of wrong. The stress is wrong. It’s all back to front and odd, but very beautifully done. What I’m getting to is, to do something like that, a very refined version of something, you’ve got to know where it’s coming from – you’ve got to know how to do something the correct way before you can do it wrong.
You can read the full interview in the September issue of LeftLion, or download a digital copy of the feature (pdf).
Ahead of his show here at the Gallery in April / May 2015, Simon Callery invited us down to his studio just outside of London. Simon and Gallery Resource Manager Tom Godfrey discuss the process of creating a painting and Simon’s approach to colour, as well as thoughts on collaboration, experimentation and much more.