Jeffrey Dennis's work often explores people’s daily experience, movement and inhabitation. Born in Colchester in 1958, Dennis graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in 1980 and has been exhibiting since 1979. His paintings have embedded glimpses of contemporary urban life within landscapes of processed peas, rotting fruit or Victorian wallpaper designs and, more recently, the 'bubblescape', an organic matrix which seems to offer the potential for continual mutation and evolution. His works are in public and private collections across the world, including the Arts Council Collection, British Council, Tate and Foundation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris. Jeffrey Dennis is also a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts. In 2015 he held his most extensive solo exhibition, Ringbinder, at Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland.
Painting: Atoms and Speech Bubbles
23 May 2017
In this panel discussion, chaired by artist and writer Zara Worth, artists Jeffrey Dennis, Kimathi Donkor and Fay Nicolson will discuss their practices in relation to the expanded field of contemporary painting.
Each artist will speak about their individual reference points, as well as how their work negotiates between a kind of surface strategy of collage or appropriation of snapshots, magazine images and other windows onto popular culture and the everyday, and a contemplation on scale of the human in relation to his or her political, historical and molecular context.
The same evening will see the launch of Jeffrey Dennis’s new publication Ringbinder, a monograph based on his solo exhibition at Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art in 2015. Edited by Andrew Hunt and George Vasey, designed by James Langdon, the book includes essays by Sue Hubbard, Sunil Manghani and Dan Smith, an interview with the artist, and the thoughts of artists, writers, curators and gallery directors including Stephen Bury, Jeffery Camp, Nigel Cooke, Dan Coombs, Penelope Curtis, Dexter Dalwood, Stephen Farthing, Catherine Ferguson, Rebecca Fortnum, Ian Giles, Martin Holman, Timothy Hyman, Elizabeth Magill, Jo Melvin, Eleanor Moreton, Lynda Morris, Andrew Nairne, Mathew Sawyer, Barry Schwabsky, Nicholas Serota, Donald Smith, Damian Taylor, Rob Tufnell, Virginia Verran, Emrys Williams and Sam Windett.
Speaker biographies
-
Jeffrey Dennis
-
Kimathi Donkor
Kimathi Donkor is a contemporary painter who lives and works in London. He re-imagines legendary encounters across Africa and its global Diasporas, often through historic figures like Harriet Tubman and Toussaint L'Ouverture. His solo exhibitions have included Gallery MOMO in Johannesburg, as well as at Rivington Place and the Bettie Morton Gallery in London. Group exhibitions include The Diaspora Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale, Untitled: Art on the Conditions of Our Time at the New Art Exchange (Nottingham, 2017) and the 29th São Paulo Biennial (Brazil, 2010). He earned his PhD at Chelsea College of Arts and is a post-doctoral research fellow with the TrAIN research centre.
-
Fay Nicolson
Fay Nicolson (b.1984 Derby) is interested in the making, moving, marking body and how transient or aesthetic experience can(not) be transcribed or translated. For Nicolson, making becomes performative and relationships between images and actions are ambiguous. Paintings can be objects, images, scores, theatrical backdrops or documents. The promise of transformation and fluidity between the material, digital and ephemeral is an atmospheric undercurrent of her work. Nicolson graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2011 and Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in 2006. Nicolson lectures at Brighton University and NUA. Recent solo exhibitions and projects include: Recent solo exhibitions and projects include: A COMMUNITY OF SENSATION, Jupiter Woods, London, 2017; I Love Your Euclidean Stance, Galileo Flow, Towards, Toronto, CA (2016); OVER AND OVER PURE FORM (an enactment), Kunstraum, London ( 2016); UN MAKE ME, Galerie Rolando Anselmi, Berlin (2016); OVER AND OVER PURE FORM, Grand Union, Birmingham, UK; PLAY SENSE, Gerald Moore Gallery, London, UK (both 2015); A P E L, Almanac Projects, London, UK; P A R E, West Lane South, London, UK; WORK WITH MATERIAL, Künstlerhaus Wien, Vienna, AU (all 2013).
-
Zara Worth
Zara Worth is currently researching the cultures and economies of Web2.0 as part of a practice-led PhD with Leeds Beckett University since being awarded a studentship to pursue her research. Identifying as a post-internet artist, her work explores the neoliberal condition and burgeoning food and lifestyle trends using hybrid methodologies including performance, drawing, object-making and new media. In 2013 she was shortlisted for the Woon Foundation Art Prize before going on to receive a scholarship from Goldsmiths, she currently based in North East England. Her recent work Wellness (2017) will be published in the Journal of Writing in Creative Practice later this year.
