Le Ravissement des Couleurs

Pierre Lesieur

February 10th - March 3rd 2019

Chalet Farb, Farbstrasse 20, 3792 Saanen, Switzerland / Chalet Mittelgaessli, Dorfstrasse 79, 3792 Saanen, Switzerland

Eric and Caroline Freymond, together with Andreas Siegfried are pleased to present ‘Le Ravissement des couleurs’ a selection of late works by the late French artist Pierre Lesieur. Following up on the recent retrospective of Pierre Lesieur’s work at the Musée Bonnard in Le Cannet in Provence we are delighted to present his works within the context of a private home in Gstaad. Lesieur’s colourful and vibrant depictions of arabesque interiors, antiques, as well as extraordinary objects, will be given a unique display inside the most sought-after interiors of the Chalet Farb.

Born in 1922 this major painter was part of the movement of the second school of Paris. The artist took part in over thirty solo as well as group shows between Paris, London, New York, and Tokyo. Lesieur was a nomad at heart and a true explorer, having travelled all over Europe, the Orient, as well as Asia and India. He achieved to create a seamless dialogue bringing together all these different cultures in his paintings. In his houses in Paris as well as Saint Remy de Provence he created a unique atmosphere of interiors that would reflect his passion for adventure and travels.

The first impression one has looking at his paintings is that they have an immediate presence and imagination and therefore seem very contemporary in their composition as well as in the harmony of colours. Lesieur’s aim throughout his work was to try to create the infinite variety of a tone, therefore enhancing different spatial configurations within a specific interior. In simplifying a figurative composition turning it in an almost abstract one, he achieves to keep the balance between figuration and abstraction and therefore never loses sight of his true calling.

Lesieur often gets compared with the French impressionist painter Pierre Bonnard, as his compositions sometimes resemble the latter. However, Bonnard’s paintings often depict objects that contrasts in colours according to different times of the day and that are part of a narrative inside a daily intimate scene. Lesieur’s aim, in contrast, is to put the object as its core subject, intensifying in this way its shape, colour and movement, making the object seem alive like in an imaginary dream.

The exhibition assembles forty paintings, spanning over the period of 1998 to 2009. The exhibition is split between two locations, for the larger works at Chalet Farb, and for the smaller works at Chalet Mittelgaessli in Saanen.

Siegfried Contemporary and Espace Muraille are pleased to present Visual Vertigo, a solo-exhibition of new works by Anton Alvarez.

Alvarez invents the machines that make his sculptures, and with them creates his own rules and challenges. This ongoing investigation of art and authorship began with a polychromatic thread-wrapping machine that bound together wood forms into functional furniture and abstract, architectural art. The exploration continues with his current project, a monolithic clay extruder that, at the push of a button, ejaculates (or defecates) entire sculptures. The process is not absolutely automatic, it requires an operator’s negotiation of pressure, speed, height, impact, intent, and aesthetic judgment. Not that the operator has to be the artist himself, but this is a world of Alvarez’s own making, and it is, in that sense, his alone to manage and master.

Part of what’s captivating about Alvarez’s art is that the evolution of which he speaks is towards something that seems uncertain to the outsider: Is it progress towards ever greater mastery of the machine or of the material, or a greater blurring of the lines between authorship, art, engineering and craftsmanship? The questions seem to proceed endlessly until the absurdity of art as self-imposed problem solving becomes emblematic of the whole human endeavor – a self-generated, self-referential land and divine comedy.

Alvarez is currently investigating alternative possibilities with the machine, looking at the structural capabilities of thread-wrapped fabric and the decorative details made possible by mixing the glue with paint. "I have full control over the development of the machine," said Alvarez, explaining that the set-up allows him to be independent from industry as well as from tradition. "I can freely experiment and develop it according to what I discover are my needs in this new craft." It is a thought echoed by Glenn Adamson, director of the Museum of Art & Design New York, when he recently wrote, “The 21st-century maker has flattened traditional hierarchies and escaped rigid categories of production through post-disciplinary practices and the innovative application of skill and technique.

Havana

Leandro Feal

Apr 21 - June 5 2018

Siegfried Contemporary Private showroom, 16 Bassett Road, London W106JJ

Havana, a solo show by Leandro Feal, is focused on a series that documents life surrounding the Roma bar, with themes such as sexual liberation, the cores of intimate and private freedom that happen within a context with characteristics of collectivization and normalization of the experience, a whole counterculture that might even be included inside the greater narrative of Cuban identity.

Why the Roma bar? Because it is one of the few private businesses that has settle itself as a space not only for consumption but also for cultural expression, a site where concurs a large part of the current Cuban artistic avant-garde and that has been visited by international artists, celebrities and local characters of the island intellectuality, and from different gene- rations. As well as a group of young people who have decided to bet on an image of a cosmopolitan Cuba, different, but at the same time with the authentic stamp of a context marked by its political and economic characteristics.

The Roma bar is also one of the nuclei where you can see the atmosphere of cultural and economic openness in recent years in Cuba, where many young people come together; persons who have finished their university studies or in the course of them have preferred the private work in various ways, a small alternative economy society with more access to money that generates a different lifestyle, sometimes very linked to Havana night. Places like Studio 54, or Andy Warhol’s Factory, or the Factory from the rave scene in Manchester, or the cafe Lhemitz from the photos by André Petersen, or the mythical bars of the Movida Madrileña are proof of the importance of this kind of sites in the process of gestation and expansion towards new cultural sensitivities.

Parasol Unit hosted a screening of the artist video work "Hotel Roma", followed by an in-conversation with Leandro Feal, Andreas Siegfried, and Parasol Unit director Ziba Ardalan.

Laesae Majestatis

Egle Jauncems

Feb 13 - March 03 2018

Chalet Mittelgässli, Dorfstrasse 79, 3792 Saanen / Switzerland

Egle Jauncems started making lemons last summer, in her bid to rival the old masters. The humble lemon exalted in Spanish Baroque still lifes, connotes luxury, nostalgia and melancholia. The lemon, perfectly ripe, is both her companion and seducer, symbol of power, wealth, purity, and not least, her daily salad dressing. On the radio, she remembers Yotam Ottolenghi choosing the lemon tree to take onto his ‘Desert Island’. It connects him to his cooking recipes, but also to the history of trade, migration and painting. Such overheard and overseen fragments will launch Jauncems into a new body of work.

Ambivalent, conflicted representations of masculinity is Jauncems’ core subject. Her wide-ranging practice combines painting, drawing, sculpture, weaving, printmaking, and performance. This exhibition Laesae Majestatis brings together new and recent bodies of work, including a large installation, drawings, paintings and sculpture. Here Jauncems reveals the vulnerabilities of traditional masculine typologies, be they princes, canonical painters, bodybuilders or famous chefs. She extracts humour and eroticism from the frilly excess that accompanies projections of power and competence. Yet her work is a fundamentally empathetic and playful critique, albeit indulging the urge to undress the emperor, to see what might be hiding under his tunic.

Jauncems was active in the alternative music scene in Vilnius, before moving to Taiwan to learn the Chinese language and craft techniques in remote villages, and finally moving to London to study fine art. In 2017, Jauncems graduated from the Royal College of Art, where she was the inaugural David Hockney scholar.

Born in 1984, in Vilnius, Egle Jauncems lives and works in London, where she continues to make lemons

The Weather in Russia is Fine

Kjetil Berge

Nov 22nd - Jan 18th 2018

Siegfried contemporary Private showroom, 16 Bassett Road, London W106JJ

Berge's work addresses the inter-connectivity between people and how a real connection can be easily lost when we substitute technology or dogmatic ideology for direct human contact. How do we communicate to solve mutual problems?

The backbone of the show is the video Breaking the Ice (2013) documenting Berge's mid-winter drive in an ice cream van. Setting out from London, he travels up via Scandinavia, Estonia and Russia, to Kirkenes on the north-eastern border of Norway and Russia, stopping off to engage with passers-by, distributing ice cream in return for conversations about the weather. The title of the show is a quote from one of the conversations. Is talking about the weather an opening to meaningful interaction, or is it a screening of real communication, a detour to avoid difficult discussions about what happens when the ice cream is gone?

A video from Berge’s recent collaboration with Jason Havneraas, The Ice Cream Eaters (2014) is shown alongside Breaking the Ice.

The large sculpture in the exhibition bears the title Concorde, referring both to agreement and referring to the ambitious technological aeronautic endeavour, ultimately abandoned. A set of stairs invites us to ascend the towering pulpit-like structure. At the summit we are faced with the immediacy of a domestic sphere in the form of a crocheted fabric screen. This is mounted at the front like a propeller or windmill. Where do we direct our questions, air opinions or exchange viewpoints? Through the material, at it, away from it? How do we orientate ourselves and avoid paranoia?

The Future of Loran is the title of one of the works from Berge’s recent series of collages. Loran was a radar navigation system developed in the United States during World War II, recently closed down amidst controversy. One of the largest, original masts is near Berge's home on the Lofoten Islands in the north of Norway. Combining warning tapes, sweet wrappers, photos and patterning structures, low-tech coded messages are stuck together, transmitting the recurring themes of the exhibition. They use humble everyday means to signal an alarm on short-term consumer gratification and its effects on the world. As explorations, they are jottings to develop Berge’s processes of thinking about how we can communicate. How to solve the urgent problems of our collective destiny?

Berge’s practise predominantly takes the form of filmed performative pieces, sculptures, installations and photography. Drawing on the personal and political, he uses an exploratory approach to making art that informs each project as it develops. By fostering opportunities for collaboration on different levels he often involves contributors in his work. Berge likes to encourage the spontaneous, opening up potential for creativity in unforeseen ways. For the 9th Havana Biennial, Cuba Berge showed A BAILAR, 2006 a social sculpture attracting crowds providing Hip-Hop, poetry and vocal performances. At W!7, Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo, Berge did the project ALYANS, 2009 a stab at learning Turkish informed by the Turkish Norwegian Immigrant scene in Oslo. Breaking the Ice, 2013 was made for the arts festival Barents Spektakel, Kirkenes, produced by NNKS, Svolvær. Currently he enjoys a very productive collaboration with the artist Jason Havneraas. Berge is also on the artistic board of LIAF, Lofoten International Arts Festival, Norway and appreciates his various roles in education. He is continually motivated by his commute between the UK and Norway.

Tropicana

Anton Alvarez

Jonathan Trayte

Sept 13th - Sept 22nd 2017

Christie's Mayfair, 103 New Bond Street, London W1S 1ST

Christie's and Siegfried Contemporary present Tropicana.

Anton Alvarez has invented several machines, one of which uses thread, pigment and glue to bind together materials such as scraps of wood and electrical cords to create objects that are seemingly a hybrid between furniture and sculpture. He is concerned with being a craftsman and an engineer and states that "when I'm designing the machines I can be very free." Alvarez embraces chance in the process which he continually revises but believes that the machines are "like an extension of me... It is a machine, but it is almost like a brushstroke." He created a second machine which is called the Extruder and consists of a large metal cylinder supported by a metal base that contorts clay into shapes by applying pressure to the wet material, squeezing it out into shapes.

Jonathan Trayte's approach to making sculpture and installation is informed by our global language of consumption and the manipulation of consumer decision-making. Using a wide range of materials, methods and processes, his work reinterprets modern consumer behaviour and explores the psychology of desire through surface, material, light and colour. From processed meats and melons to giant gourds and exotic yams, Trayte often transforms organic objects into cast and painted bronze. Once assembled and delicately stacked in precarious arrangements, the work is then coated in meticulously painted layers. It is a coming together of natural forms and saccharine colours. Glossy synthetic skins of paint give the work a colourful pop status, a chameleon appearance and an almost edible quality.

press release: Christie's

press release: The Telegraph

Of Things Long Forgotten

Radhika Khimji

Anne Roger Lacan

Apr 28th - Jun 18th 2017

Siegfried contemporary Private showroom, 16 Bassett Road, London W106JJ

Siegfried Contemporary is pleased to showcase the work of French artist Anne Roger Lacan and Indian, London-based artist Radhika Khimji.

Of Things Long Forgotten is a two person show exploring ideas of memory, affections, and the sense of a lost past.

That very moment you want to recreate, once it is lost in the past, metamorphoses into a source of inexpressible nostalgia. It is just that sense of memory that Roger Lacan and Khimji seek to resuscitate.

Anne Roger Lacan’s practice has strong connections with Art Brut, the artistic movement initiated by Jean Dubuffet. She uses found objects and creates sculptures with very strong psychological content. Her work is especially poignant in its attention to details, utilising found objects made from fabric, stone and shells, as well as coral, wire, etc. Each object acts as a link between yesterday and today and contains within itself the foundation of a narrative — a story that brings together the fragments of a life, dreams forgotten and lost, found again. A painful smile or the smell of a perfume can become the glue that mends lost memories and fantasies. Always reminding us of the fragility of our identity and our sense of self.

Radhika Khimji’s uses as a base images she took in her ancestral home of Kutch, Gujurat, Western India. Her process can be described as conceptual, as time is the crucial element she is concerned with. The culmination of many different durations, bringing together the time it took to take the picture, the time it takes to stitch the work, with how long it took to transfer the image on to the page. Her work operates at a crossroads between multiple polarities, suspended between sculpture, painting, drawing and decoration. By combining all of these elements, images overlap with one another to create strange new hybrids. The series of 25 works are internal landscapes. In using black ink and red thread she joins visual gaps in the work. This empty space provides the abstract element in an otherwise historically loaded work. The viewer detects a variety of semi-abstract figures that offer a mere hint of recognizable gestures expressing an energized and menacing sexuality.

I wanted to put both artists together as I sensed a strong connection between their working practices and their individual personalities. Both of them explore, each in their own way, the creation of individual, subjective worlds. A unifying theme of their work is that for both artists the process of making is essential, each starting in unawareness of the final outcome of their artworks.

The Beast Within

Maria Thurn und Taxis

Feb 10th - Mar 4th 2017

Chalet Mittelgaessli, Saanen b. Gstaad, Switzerland

For the first time in Switzerland, Siegfried Contemporary is pleased to showcase the work of the German, London-based artist, Maria Thurn und Taxis.

The exhibition The Beast within contains a beautiful selection of watercolors and oil paintings of various sizes. The title of the show was taken from a horror novel written by Edward Levy as well as an Interactive movie game, where the storyline weaves together werewolf mythology and Bavarian history with sexual intrigue.

Maria Thurn und Taxis’ education and upbringing had a big impact in the result of her art practice. In her own words she says: “I think to believe in the ability to channel “the Beast within” is what defines our humanity with all it's positive and negative consequences.”

The works in this show examine the role of masks in regards to our very identity. Maria’s oeuvre is not simply a question of depicting the protagonists of her drawings and paintings wearing masks, which disguise, or exaggerate their personalities. The power within her art concerns itself with the act of transformation, and the effect this has on them and those who encounter them. Maria enjoys creating ambiguity. And, as a result, she uses her work to pose questions, which paradoxically engages and frustrates us, encouraging us to contemplate these thoughts, without offering an answer or a solution.

The artist creates a status quo that allows for confusion. The figures that populate her paintings and drawings are attractive in a Baroque sense: that is they exist on the borderline between sensuality and excess; between the carnivalesque and the grotesque.

The subjects are often brightly, even garishly, coloured. Sometimes they stand alone, defiant against stark grounds of white or sky blue, in other moments they morph into strange totem-like hybrids: part animal, robot and toy. A first glance at one of these 'hybrids' something invitingly tactile emerges. There is an inherent sweetness in a naive sense, that adheres to a well established exploration of sophisticated societies expressing their ideas in seemingly simple symbols. However, the artist quickly refutes this simplistic reading by leading us into the territory of Art Brut. She is reminding us of Dubuffet's search for an art form influenced not only by ethnography, but also one that reflected the simple life of the everyday human with all its inherent complexities, challenges and suffering.

Maria talks of how her delicately rendered drawings, watercolours and more robust, impastoed oil paintings are compiled through the collation of material that comprises anthropological journals, images sourced from current affairs' magazine and pulp pop culture. The hybrid creatures that are born from this melange reflect the currents that run through the artist's own psyche, and the culture she herself grew up in. She explains:'I ask myself, what is it that makes me tick as a human being? What are the influences, traditions and belief systems that come together to form us, and what role does the media have in this mix? How can I make sense of the world?

This is only one possible reading of Maria’s practice. The figures and Totems she creates form a bridge between ancient traditions, beliefs, and science fiction. She explores the personifications of artificial intelligence in imagined future forms. The mask and the totem have long been associated with shamanic practices, notably with portals between life and death, so we must also consider that there is also a spiritual angle to T and T’s figures.

The artist has not restricted her investigations of this theme to the mediums of oil and watercolour. She has recently returned to film making, producing compelling 'shorts' that splice together cuts from pre existing material, resulting in arresting and often entertaining, new narratives. As with her two dimensional work, it is Maria’s keen eye for creating maximum impact through strange and surprising juxtapositions, that engenders a strong and complex reaction in the viewer.

Nomansland

Antony Easton

Nov 18th - Dec 18th 2016

Siegfried contemporary Private showroom, 16 Bassett Road, London W106JJ

Siegfried Contemporary is pleased to showcase Nomansland, an exhibition with new photographs by Antony Easton.

The title of the exhibition reflects on the the space between things, between human nature and nature, the day and the night, the land and the sea, reality and dream, question and answer.

The day has ended but the night is yet to begin and as the sky darkens it temporarily matches the tonality of the landscape and man-made light appears brighter than the sun. The magic hour, when the day’s energy is spent and the oncoming, restorative power of sleep allows our unconscious to re-inform our interpretation of truth.

In those moments the view clears and we seek enlightenment.

The camera flash has become short-hand for immediacy and the latest news, but here it is applied to landscape, subverting the language of this momentary, intense burst of light, heightening a moment of stillness and reflection.

Photography has changed forever. The majority of the empirical work employed on a daily basis by the great photographers is not necessary anymore, advancements in camera and print technologies have pushed the boundaries of how we can capture and reinterpret the world around us, allowing us to create new narratives in photography-based image-making.

Nomansland is Antony Easton’s third solo show following It’s All Around You at Gallery Muse in 2014 and Electric Trees at Julian Hartnoll in 2015. He studied at both Chelsea School of Art and St. Martins School of Art, and has been, in no particular order, a graphic designer, art director/ creative director (Saatchi and Saatchi), a commercials director and an award-winning short film director.

Seven Days of Luck

Michel Pérez Pollo

Oct 4th - Nov 5th 2016

Siegfried Contemporary in collaboration with MAI 36 Galerie, 16 Bassett road, London W106JJ

Siegfried Contemporary is excited to showcase for the first time in the UK the work of the Cuban painter Michel Pérez Pollo, in collaboration with MAI 36 Galerie, Zurich.

The artist's abstract-figurative style of painting gives him a unique position in his generation, and among artists in Cuba as a whole. When one knows his painting it is difficult not to identify some of his pictures. Pérez Pollo places significant emphasis on the importance acquired by the work process. For him, sculpture and photography precede the pictorial act, since the artist builds models or mock-ups, with either Plasticine, Stones or other materials which he later photographs in order transmit them from there to the canvas.

Pollo's works are a sort of tribute to the Avant-garde since he assimilates, from an entirely contemporary perspective, the great contributions of modern art. Simultaneously, the metaphysic element characterizing his paintings act as reminiscent of the surrealist movement. His works are wrapped in an aura of mystery which makes the viewer question the existence of those forms and the way in which they reached their present state; their existence seems possible, although reason indicates it is not so.

Michel Pérez Pollo's particular style of painting is bold, often lavish in his application of the fluid paint, and therefore reminiscent of revolutionary murals, depictions imbued with messages. He focuses on the superordinate, the human-personal, so that his paintings seem like expressions of a new humanism.

For this show Pollo has created two new series that start from a common idea: the realization of forms from chaotic or arbitrary concepts. One is "Seven days of luck", a "series" composed by a single artwork made by 7 canvases, which also gives the title to the exhibition because according to his opinion the meaning of " luck " implicitly refers to the idea of the casual and unplanned. For this artwork, he has selected the winning lottery numbers in a week and based on the mathematical sums of these numbers he constructed paper figures, which he then used as a model for the paintings. For the other series, to which belong all the other works of the exhibition, he used the same process but building forms from the sum of "climate parameters". Figures derived from temperature, relative humidity or atmospheric pressure, among others, become patterns for the creative act of setting the lengths on each stretch which will give form to a figure.

Michel Pérez Pollo was born in 1981 in Manzanillo, Cuba, where he also lives and works. His works have been exhibited at various Ibero-American venues and occasionally in Europe. Gallery Mai 36 in Zurich has had two solo shows with him.

For more information on the artist please visit: here

Electric Dreams

Ching-yuk Jade Ng

Madeleine Roger-Lacan

Faye Wei Wei

Jun 24th - Jul 3rd 2016

Siegfried contemporary Private showroom, 16 Bassett Road, London W106JJ

Siegfried Contemporary is pleased to announce “Eclectic Dreamers” featuring paintings by three emerging international artists who recently graduated from Slade School of Fine Art.

Ching-Yuk Jade NG, Madeleine Roger-Lacan and Faye Wei Wei are brought together in this show due to their shared fascination with dreams as a way of pushing the boundaries of their realities and challenging their imagination. In their paintings the distinctions between dream and life, fiction and reality become blurred. The surreal aspect within their work engages the viewer in an exploration into subconsciousness.

Ching-Yuk Jade NG is an interdisciplinary artist who was born in China and currently lives and works in London. Her work is largely inspired by her travels to various obscure places. The fading memories of her trips and the material she made on her journeys become the tools to create her painting. Her interest lies in deconstructing symbolism within real life events and make them part of her fictions. Within the scale of her paintings she focuses on very detailed intricate patterns that create a background for elaborate dreamlike scenery inspired by Western as well as Asian traditions. The contrast between small and large generates a delusion and blurs the difference between truth and fantasy.

Madeleine Roger-Lacan is a French artist and student at the École des Beaux-Arts who recently moved to London to complete an exchange course at Slade School of Fine Art. Always working in a very instinctive way, her subject is informed by a mix up of her experiences, her dreams and what she absorbs from the environment around her. In her paintings she places those elements together in order to embrace reality and maximise it. In this sense her work can be seen as autobiographical. Her paintings are characterized by humor, close framing and a use of symbols from daily life and popular culture. While living in Paris her paintings played with the idea of having a choice between showing or hiding, presence and absence. Her move to London encouraged her to push the boundaries of her imagination even further.

Faye Wei Wei was born and lives in South London. For her, painting becomes a performative and physical process since her body is what defines the limits of the images she creates. By placing her figures in different levels between the for- and the background her paintings acquire a strange depth where the drawing floats above the abstract marks playing with sparseness and restraint. Strange childlike faces together with subtle marks, and symbols sit within a complex compositional structure and give her work a sense of surreal lightness. In her paintings she creates a reality that oscillates between the strange and the familiar.

Transition

Angelique de Folin

May 27th - Jun 25th 2016

Siegfried contemporary Private showroom, 16 Bassett Road, London W106JJ

Four years have elapsed since Angelique de Folin’s last exhibition. Since that time, she has completed 15 new works of art, delicate watercolours of plants and fruits brushed with extraordinary refinement onto slim slices of vellum (calf-skin parchment) in a technique with a rich artistic history but which, in our modern times, has become more or less obsolete. One vellum factory remains in business in the United Kingdom and its survival depends upon Parliament’s willingness to maintain the long and expensive tradition of printing copies of its legislation on these small and precious sheets. As long as Parliament defers a decision to implement a cheaper solution and replace vellum with paper, Folin’s supply, and therefore her art, will be assured but it’s a precarious situation.

“Besides her work for this exhibition, one other factor has occupied her focus in recent seasons. Some of Folin’s work had previously been selected for the Highgrove Florilegium, a lavish editioned publication documenting the plant life of HRH The Prince of Wales’ celebrated Gloucestershire garden.

“More recently, Folin’s work has been selected for inclusion in the Transylvania Florilegium presently being created under the umbrella of the Prince of Wales's Foundation Romania to record in a permanent way the flora of Transylvania.

“However this princely venture may turn out to mark a conclusion, or at least an interregnum, in Folin’s long admired practice.”

To be sure, the new exhibition features exquisite portraits of a pear and a pineapple and a quince and a particularly delightful nutmeg composition in which the fruit is depicted in three successive stages of its evolution. But there is a new feature which appears to mark a turning point in her art. A large leaf, no longer a recognisable specimen, slips into the corner of the vellum sheet and is truncated by its margins. It’s a bold compositional device and unexpected from one of the most precisely accurate flora artists of our times.

Even more unusual, and admirable, are two studies of bark peeling away from the stem of a sapling. No longer is the tree’s skin the subject of the work. Instead, it is the act of the skin shedding and revealing something about the specimen at its core as it does so. It’s too early to hail Folin as an early 21st Century follower of Egon Schiele but these are the most revelatory works of her career and speak of an artist who wants to say something about herself as much as the nature which has inspired her career.

Text by Roger Bevan

For more information on the artist visit her website: here

Kookoo

James Franco

Feb 5th - Feb 26th 2016

Chalet Mittelgaessli, Saanen b. Gstaad, Switzerland

Siegfried Contemporary is pleased to announce its first exhibition in Switzerland featuring new paintings by the American artist and actor James Franco.

The exhibition entitled “KooKoo” is comprised of 13 new paintings of birds. As Franco points out, "Birds are mystical creatures that inhabit our world and just as easily fly away. They're like fairies on the periphery of civilized life." Here birds of all sorts and sizes cover the exhibition space, from floor to ceiling, creating a kind of ‘cuckoo’ (mad) atmosphere. This new body of work is a continuation of the ‘Fat animal’ and bird paintings that were shown at Siegfried Contemporary in London in November 2014.

“KooKoo” is inspired by its charming setting: a small chalet in the mountains that bears a strong resemblance to a cuckoo clock. As intended, the bird paintings complement the quaint architecture of Swiss chalets. The title of the exhibition can also be seen as a comment on Franco's multi-faceted film personas as well as his own real life character which is often provocative and deranged while at the same time enchanting and witty.

Franco’s paintings have a naive quality, stressing the importance of childhood and coming of age as a formative period in our lives. His paintings are humorous, they are his way of responding to the everyday life experiences he encounters as an acclaimed actor.

JAMES FRANCO has participated in the arts since he was very young. He dedicated himself to figure drawing classes as a teenager and pursued painting as well. While his acting career took off, he continued to study and participate in the art world. During this time, James’ paintings were shown at LACY GALLERY and GLU GALLERY in Los Angeles. He combined his acting experience and his love of art in Carter’s Erased James Franco, which was shown internationally, but most notably at the TATE MODERN in London and MoMA in New York.

James’ show Dangerous Book Four Boys appeared in solo exhibitions at THE CLOCKTOWER GALLERY in New York City and PERES PROJECTS GALLERY in Berlin. In 2011, James and Gus Van Sant came together to do a show entitled Unfinished at the GAGOSIAN GALLERY in Los Angeles. The show was focused around and inspired by River Phoenix and Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho. In the Summer of 2011, James opened two separate shows in New York at MoMA PS1 and THE ASIAN SONG SOCIETY. In September 2011, James was offered the great honor of having exhibition space at THE VENICE BIENNALE for his project, Rebel. James participated in PERFORMA 2011 collaborating on the piece Three Performances in Search of Tennessee with Laurel Nakadate. In February 2012, James also showed Memories of Idaho at LINCOLN CENTER.

In February 2013, James had a solo show, titled Gay Town, at PERES PROJECTS GALLERY in Berlin. His next solo show, Psycho Nacirema, curated by Douglas Gordon, opened at PACE GALLERY in London on June 5th, 2013. He exhibited his series of photographs, New Film Stills, at PACE GALLERY in New York in Spring 2014 and at GALERIE CINEMA as a part of Paris’ Mois de la Photo 2014. Additionally, he had a show a SIEGFRIED CONTEMPORARY in London in Fall 2014. In 2015, James participated in a group show titled Cerebral Vortex at MAMA Gallery in Los Angeles as well as two shows, A California Childhood and Bromance, with his brother Tom Franco.

James holds an MFA from the Tisch School of the Arts in DIRECTING at NEW YORK UNIVERSITY. He received his MFA in DIGTIAL MEDIA from the RHODE ISLAND SCHOOL OF DESIGN in the Spring of 2012.

Franco is internationally well known as an actor and played in countless films, such as: 127 hours, “Spiderman 1,2 and 3”, “Milk”, “Pineapple Express” to name a few.

9 Times the Modern Man and Moon

Alasdair McLuckie

Oct 12th - Nov 14th 2015

Siegfried Contemporary in collaboration with Mother's Tankstation, 16 Bassett road, London W106JJ

Alasdair McLuckie (born Australia, 1984) was raised in a suburban Melbourne household amongst a collection of ethnographic artefacts. While studying fine art, he found himself drawn backwards from the prescribed western pathway, or notionality of the avant-garde, towards what he understood as a more honest path to art, through folk narrative and ‘primitivism’. Consequently, he sought instruction from his father, an amateur anthropologist, who taught him to use a rudimentary loom to produce intricate designs in woven beadwork. The subsequent development of his distinctive, obsessive and symbolic visual language is adopted from the disciplines of this meticulous craft and he equates its process-driven nature to seasonality, cycles and attendant fertility rituals.

McLuckie’s new installation for Siegfried Contemporary (in collaboration with mother’s tankstation) consists of sequential series of iconic bead paintings and low relief, ‘cut-away’ biro drawings on bookbinders’ board, both of which blur the distinctions between two and three-dimensional objecthood. McLuckie’s distinctive, exotic – quixotic, even – work has garnered significant curatorial interest in Australia; his first solo exhibition is represented in the collection of MoNA, Hobart; Ten Cubed, a private collection, where an evolving top ten selection of contemporary artists, is collected and exhibited in depth over ten years. With more recent work being featured in survey exhibitions, Future Primitive, at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne and Melbourne Now at the National Gallery of Victoria. McLuckie is the recipient of the Art in Australia / Credit Suisse Contemporary Art Award, 2012 and Qantas SOYA Visual Art Award, 2013.

Spring Awakenings - Frühlingserwachen

Dean Adams

May 15th - Jun 12th 2015

Siegfried contemporary Private showroom, 16 Bassett Road, London W106JJ

Siegfried Contemporary has the pleasure to showcase new works by US ceramicist Dean Adams.

Dean Adams is of American Nationality, based in Montana. He is also a Professor and teaches art at the Montana State University. Adams uses Ceramic sculpture as a confrontational tool, where he comments on social issues.

With his very witty and provocative sculptures Dean explores new Paradigms on how to look at male sexuality. He uses the means of ceramic to express these notions. He has chosen the image of the penis combined with other imagery, especially birds, to create icons of a new model contrary to popular cultural attitudes of male sexuality.

By detaching the penis from realistic human form and re-contextualizing with the bird form he creates a new paradigm for a contemporary world. He de-erotizes the penis and celebrates maleness in a playful, humorous way that permits viewers to let their guard down. Humor allows him to be more furtive. There is a parallel between his work and other form of humor. Bigoted humor is the most subversive form of intolerance because of the guise of humor. In his work he uses wit subversively, but in a positive way, allowing the viewer to consider the penis, maleness, homosexuality, heterosexuality, bisexuality in that way that is unhindered by the human form.

He intends his pieces to act as metaphors, representing uninhibited phallic sexuality which is negative to neither males nor females.

The exhibition’s title plays homage to Frank Wedekind’s play, Spring Awakening which with brutal honesty and a humoristic sense follows a group of adolescence while they explore their new found sexuality. The play, acts as a provocative critique to the sexually oppressive culture of the 19th century society. Following this path, Dean Adams with his humorous approach provides his own critique to today’s society. It is through his work that he is trying to violate a taboo born out of mainstream cultural connotations expressing male sexuality as characterized by abuse, domination, pornography and narcissism. In his eyes we are a society that is, paradoxically, phallocentric, phallophobic, homophobic and repressed.

Adams has shown his work extensively in America as well as China and is represented in some major Private as well as Museum collections around the world. This is Adams first exhibition in Europe.

Strange I've Seen That Face Before.....

Caroline Achaintre

Anne Roger Lacan

Mar 26th - Apr 25th 2015

Siegfried contemporary Private showroom, 16 Bassett road, London W106JJ

Siegfried Contemporary is pleased to announce: “Strange I‘ve seen that Face before……” a two person exhibition with UK based artist Caroline Achaintre and Paris based artist Anne Roger Lacan.

What brings them together in this show is their shared interest in the Human Psychology as well as Shamanism, particularly issues of a possible Dual (or maybe multiple) existences of one’s self, be it in the past, present or future.

Caroline Achaintre cites German Expressionism and post-war British sculpture as influences on her work; these movements are known for their crude aesthetics, which conveyed the trauma of a war-time generation. Her work also draws from ‘Primitivism’, a style of early 20th century art that incorporated imagery from tribal cultures. Achaintre is interested in these periods because they present junctures between the ancient and modern, psychological and physical, exoticism and technology.

Achaintre likens her work to anthropological museum displays, where objects are removed from another place or time and are brought into a contemporary context.

Her works takes the form of ceramics, wool tufted wall installations as well as works on paper.

Recently Caroline Achaintre opened her Solo show at Tate Britain as part of the BP spotlight commission. She also recently won the Illy Present Future Price, which showcased her work in a exhibition at the Castello di Rivoli in Torino, Italy a few months ago.

Anne Roger Lacan has always been fascinated by people and their psychological patterns and behaviors. Her work is influenced by the French outsider artist Pacsal-Désir Maisonneuve whose shell masks were a great influence on Andre Breton, the Surrealist poet and writer. Breton introduced Maisonneuve’s work to Jean Dubuffet, who then initiated Art Brut, an art produced by people who were not professionals, who operated outside the conventional aesthetic norms, and who did not belong to an artistic milieu. Anne Roger Lacan is deeply inspired by those “artists in spite of themselves”, their naïve faith,their disinterested perseverance is what she is aiming for.

Other influences are Swiss artist Jean Tinguely, famous for his machine assemblages, Kurt Schwitters and the work of Louise Bourgeois.

Anne Roger Lacan is trying to deal with her own as well as other people’s psychological issues. These can be stories, thoughts or dreams, often of very fragile nature that find their way to the artist and are then being transformed into artworks.

Roger Lacan’s oeuvre is mostly made from found material that she transforms into beautifully whimsical sculptures. She also creates drawings and poetry. Her work is a cabinet of curiosities of other people’s as well as her own journeys that life takes us on.

Andreas Siegfried is delighted to announce his first collaboration with James Franco with an exhibition of Mr. Franco's new work at Siegfried Contemporary.

This much anticipated body of work will showcase new paintings by this multidiscplinary artist famous for his work as an actor, director and screenwriter.

"This is a bold and exciting project", says Mr. Siegfried, " I have chosen James Franco as I am personally interested in aspects of how he translates his life as a celebrity in to very quirky and thought provoking works of art. What draws me most to his paintings is their powerful presence and an ever present sense of humour. James will be showing a series of paintings at my house that all reflect on the theme of James public persona versus his own privacy. Basically his "true self" in conversation with his "false self". James interests are very wide ranhing and deal with the variety of emotions he encounters in his everyday life as an actor, set against recollection of his condensed childhood memories".

In Praise of Shadows

Barnaby Hosking

Jul 19th - Oct 20th 2014

Houghton Hall, Norfolk, UK

This exhibition charts the development of the artists practice during and after his residency at Houghton Hall, which began in June 2013 when Hosking erected a Mongolian yurt in the grounds. Nestled within this bucolic surrounding, Hosking would lead a solitary life making art for five months under the guise of an "Ornamental Hermit". Since then, Hosking has continued to use this rich experience as fertile soil for a body of work that ranges in mediums from painting, sculpture, sound and more recently, bleached velvet.

Hosking’s practice commonly involves embarking on solitary art making expeditions, which necessarily remove him self from the distractions of modern life. During these periods of prolonged introspection and relationship, an intimacy arises with oneself and ones surroundings that Hosking argues, is rarely achieved during the progressively short attention span offered by the continuing proliferation of media and technology.

An important vehicle to communicate this sense of intimacy is Hosking’s use of velvet, which attempts to bridge his photographic imagery with the recollection of experience as tactile feelings. The technique of bleaching imagery into the velvet invokes the action of memories being imprinted in the mind through the clearing away of extraneous thoughts to reveal the clarity and depth of an experience. Presented in this exhibition for the first time are large abstract developments of this technique which, through their embracing depth and scale, captures for prosterity, the phenomenalogical experience of Hosking’s residency as this exhibition marks its unofficial completion.

Wrapper's Delight

Anton Alvarez

Mar 6th - Apr 17th 2014

Siegfried Contemporary in collaboration with Libby Sellers Gallery, 16 Bassett road, London W106JJ

Siegfried Contemporary is pleased to announce a solo-exhibition of new works by Anton Alvarez. The exhibition’s title pays homage to the 1979 hit rap by Sugarhill Gang and perfectly encapsulates both the energetic spirit of these new works and Alvarez’s background in graffiti art.

This new body of work celebrates the Swedish-Chilean’s distinct and idiosyncratic design approach. With a background in cabinet making, interior architecture, craft and design, coupled with his inquisitive, playful mind and strong personality, Alvarez certainly has a diverse skill set upon which to build.

Born in Uppsala, Sweden in 1980, he first studied at Konstfack, Stockholm before completing his Master’s degree in Design Products at London’s Royal College of Art in 2012. His work focuses on the design of systems and the creation of tools and processes for producing products. One such tool, the Thread Wrapping Machine, creates objects by binding the different components that go into making an object (legs, seat, back rest, etc.) together with thousands of meters of glue-coated thread. No screws, joinery or nails are used to combine the different components of the furniture – just thread. Through this, Alvarez is free to join disparate materials such as wood, steel or plastic while also creating very specific patterns with the different colours of thread.

Alvarez is currently investigating alternative possibilities with the machine, looking at the structural capabilities of thread-wrapped fabric and the decorative details made possible by mixing the glue with paint. "I have full control over the development of the machine," said Alvarez, explaining that the set-up allows him to be independent from industry as well as from tradition. "I can freely experiment and develop it according to what I discover are my needs in this new craft." It is a thought echoed by Glenn Adamson, director of the Museum of Art & Design New York, when he recently wrote, “The 21st-century maker has flattened traditional hierarchies and escaped rigid categories of production through post-disciplinary practices and the innovative application of skill and technique.”

Alvarez's work has been exhibited internationally, including presentations at MUDAC Museum in Lausanne and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

Weight and Measure

Martin Creed

Jose Dávila

Richard Long

Pedro Cabrita Reis

Fredrik Vaerslev

Jeff Wall

Oct 15th - Dec 15th 2013

Siegfried contemporary Private showroom, 16 Bassett road, London W106JJ

Andreas Siegfried and Lee Cavaliere are pleased to present a group exhibition of collective works around the theme of Weight and Measure.

The work of artist Richard Serra is the result of a lifetime spent exploring the insistence of gravity, the anticipation of crushing weight and the remoteness of geological time. This exhibition draws its title from a work on paper by this artist: an etching, which encompasses very simply notions of human experiential space, lightness and time. The diverse works in this exhibition each reflect in their own way Serra’s concerns, and communicate their own route into understanding weight and measure in art.

Fredrik Vaerslev’s work exists as a measure of time: imagined and real. The piece presented here is an expression of the fantastic through the mundane; the work is left to weather, forming seemingly everyday marks on familiar surfaces. These could be caused by ordinary daily wear and tear; yet as we realize the works are a construction, an artifice, the materials and process are revealed.

Pedro Cabrita Reis describes his work as painting, and the materials he paints with are space and light. In Una Grata su Arancio a steel grid deceptively floats from a painted surface, thrown into the space by a vibrancy of colour. The colour is applied directly to the wall, becoming part of its surroundings. The piece embodies a physical expression of modernist principles; of lightness, of lack.

Similarly, Jose Dávila’s work is a brief and erudite description of balance, gravity and weight. Using industrial materials the artist explores the notions of architecture and sculpture, drawing out parallels between form and space. The steel sculpture stands like a sketch in space, held together only by its own weight.

Other pieces take a measure of time and human effort. Martin Creed’s works often consider duration and infinity. Assigned random numbers, the pieces bear no relation to each other and yet we see in them an urgency, a need to engage with process and draw out ideas. Jeff Wall’s photograph is a study of a sapling as it is gently supported in its fragility. It is an image of nurture and of surrender; we can feel the pull of gravity and imagine the passage of time.

Alongside this, Richard Long’s work considers the limitations of human time, leveling us against the world and its sheer scale. The impossibility of that relationship is drawn here in primordial mud. We are compared physically to nature’s vastness.

As with many of the works in this show, we are invited to consider how we measure ourselves against the wider world, and to consider our own physical presence. Materials are paramount within the works on display; each considers its own objectness, its own presence. They betray a broader relationship with the physical world, or its absence; with space, with gravity, with weight and lightness.

The Cosmic Artisan

Elena Bajo

Dieter Hammer

Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh

Gregory Polony

Artie Vierkant

Apr 20th - May 24th 2013

Siegfried Contemporary, 16 Bassett Road, London W106JJ

The modern figure is not the child or the lunatic, still less the artist, but the cosmic artisan: a homemade atomic bomb. To be an artisan and no longer an artist, creator or founder, is the only way to become cosmic, to leave the milieus and the earth behind.

— Gilles Deleuze

This exhibition is the result of a co-investigation by five artists of the image’s ontology, in both its metaphysical and digital virtuality.

Curated by Bastien Rousseau

The project started by speculating about a non-mimetic photography which for us ultimately became a false concept and transformed into a Principle of Mimetic Difference; where a photograph is considered as at once mimetic and non-mimetic, existing simultaneously within and beyond both.

The invited artists have engaged with research speculating on the possible next stage of photography on the premise of a photography whose 'picture-state' is exploded through time and space.

Alberto Di Fabio’s work unites the worlds of science and art, drawing inspiration from the complex beauty of both biological and cosmic structures.

Abstract Thoughts

James White

Apr 20th - Jul 15th 2012

Siegfried Contemporary, 16 Bassett Road, London W10 6JJ

James White is well known for his black and white, meticulously crafted paintings of quiet, familiar situations and ordinary subjects. At the core of White's practice is the slow transformation of his own snapshots of daily life into paintings. By encasing the paintings in vitrine-like perspex boxes the artist emphasizes the objecthood of the work, at the same time denying the viewer a direct relationship with the painted surface. In these crystalline paintings emptied of colour, objects are reduced to the core of their essence and are turned from the tools of the everyday into symbolic fragments of a life - mysterious icons of the familiar.

For the first time in the UK, Siegfried Contemporary will also present White's new photographic work - Abstract Thoughts. These images originate from the artists personal archive of source material for his paintings. Now this photographic archive has been revisited by White, and, through subtle interventions, recontextualised into a new body of work that offers an uncanny glimpse into the process of his art.