GORD BOND

Gord Bond’s work stems from a fascination with the human form and those related, often basic human functions, emotions, and interractions. Influenced perhaps most strongly by the likes of Philip Guston, whose cartoonish representations of lugubrious, idiosyncratic characters and body parts were created as a direct response against the work of abstract expressionists working at the time, Bond’s work also often pulls both directly and indirectly from artists like Picasso (and his contemporary Braques), de Koonig, Basquiat, as well as George Condo, housing a satirical wit similar to that of Robert Crumb or David Shrigley. Bond’s characters are somewhat reductive yet highly expressive and, despite bright orange noses, purple cheeks, blue eyebrows and red lips, manage not to look clownish or overly comical. Instead, they are depicted in loose narratives with an arduous and prolific sense of play, application, and repetition. Bond allows mistakes and bad decisions to become part of the fabric of his work; vestiges of past forms sit like bruises below the surface, pushing to break through layers of paint, marker, collage, and mark-making – like a trace of where one decision ends and another begins.

GORD BOND (b. 1989, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada) lives and works in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Originally studying Science at McMaster University, he switched majors and subsequently graduated with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in 2012, then with a Masters of Fine Arts from York University in 2014. Solo exhibitions include: ‘Almost Human Nature’, Carnegia Gallery, Dundas, Canada (2017); ‘What Are We Waiting For?’, Oswald Gallery, Hamilton, Canada (2016); ‘Kin or Close Enough’, McMaster’s Fitzhenry Atrium, Hamilton, Canada (2016); and ‘Trying Not to Die’, AWOL Gallery, Toronto, Canada (2014). Group exhibitions include: ‘The Crowd’, Maiden LA Public Installation, Los Angeles, USA (2017); ‘One Horse Town’, Prop Haus, Hamilton, Canada (2017); ‘Hot Properties’, Casino Artspace, Hamilton, Canada (2017); and ‘Worked Over’, Oswald Gallery, Hamilton, Canada (2017). Bond was in ’35 Works on Paper’ group exhibition in November 2018 at BEERS London and exhibited at Zona Maco 2019 with BEERS London alongside artists Peter Matthews, Kathryn MacNaughton and Andrew Salgado.

KATHRYN MACNAUGTHON

Canadian artist Kathryn MacNaughton deftly interweaves figurative painting with a combination of abstract expressionism, geometric abstraction, and even conventions of the painted still-life into one poetic statement. Here, these forms of figuration and still life have been flattened, like their more abstract counterparts, to face the frontal plane of the canvas. In this sense, the canvas – and the analog process of the painter’s hand – references the computer screen and the digital touch, where these pieces originally begin to take their shape. She states: I wanted my digital work to look raw and handmade. Now that I create “physical” paintings, I want to give the illusion that the work is digital. MacNaughton, who trained and worked as a graphic designer, uses this sort of ‘digital compression’ to her advantage, and one begins to use typically post-analog language when discussing her work: masking, layering, colour-blocking, silhouette. Here these concepts are paired with more Romantic expressive movements: a scribble dances across a bust, outlined in silhouette, which guides the viewer’s eye around the flattened curves as one guides the finger across a map. The work simultaneously houses a sensuality one aligns with gender tropes: as suggestions of feminine curves play shadow-tricks, appearing as vessels or curtains that guide the eye, but also obscure and reveal the picture plane while painterly splatters and curves leap behind and before the picture plane. But also the masculine, referencing brutalist and Modernist architecture: the austerity and monolithic qualities of shape, form, and line, or perhaps even the sharp angles of cacti in the desert. We see references from Robert Morris to Georgia O’Keefe; Diebenkorn to DiChirico, and even a cheeky reference to the highly stylized drawings of Patrick Nagel (more colloquially known as the artist who made Playboy ‘drawings’ iconic of the entire 1980s). The work therefore works in polarities: analog and post-analog mark-making (ie: the painterly and the digital); feminine and masculine; pragmatism and Romanticism; expressiveness and obfuscation; light and dark. There is a sense of theatricality to her revelations, and it is, in every sense, a cheeky play of light and dark versus form and technique, like boxing with one’s own shadow – an art of individual, delicate mastery.

KATHRYN MACNAUGHTON (b. 1985, Toronto, Canada) lives and works in Toronto, Canada. She graduated from Ontario College of Art and Design in 2007. Solo exhibitions include: ‘Intervals’, BEERS London, London (2018), ‘Fixed State’, Bau Xi Gallery, Toronto (2018); ‘Sprang’, Bau Xi Gallery, Toronto (2016); and ‘Blue Note’, Huntclub Gallery, Toronto (2015). Group exhibitions include: ‘Dualities: A Bridge Between Two Worlds’, Bau Xi Gallery, Toronto (2017); ‘SMASH’, Gardiner Museum, Toronto (2016); and ‘The One That Got Away’, Artscape Youngplace, Toronto (2015). Macnaughton’s work has been featured in publications such as Elle Magazine, District-W Magazine, and The Coveteur. Art fairs include: Zona Maco 2019 with BEERS London.

PETER MATTHEWS

Peter Matthews’ approach to art-making is entirely unique: he travels the world, ocean to ocean, where he then creates a make-shift drawing-table/flotation-device upon which he will abscond himself – for hours at a time – in the ocean, recording what he sees and experiences in a stream-of-consciousness manner. Most recently, his works are thereafter torn into shreds upon the beach, where he sits throughout the day restitching the works into complete pieces to be mounted upon a canvas when he returns to his native UK. Through the simplicity of the works, Matthew’s comments as much on performance and ‘the conceptual’ as he does the two-dimensional picture plane. For these are paintings that are not really about painting at all, but rather about man’s inability to recapture the momentary sublime held in the vastness of nature, the bleak romanticism in the ocean as it consumes and intoxicates. Through extended hours (sometimes up to 12 hours adrift, alone at sea,) Matthews is working in real time through a very direct approach and immediate relationship with the ocean, where it becomes evident that his process is so much less about draftsmanship or material and more about an idea connected to nature and personal spirituality. Matthews seeks to question and challenge the nature of the artwork, whether an artwork can approach the metaphysical, and even momentarily take us closer to nature with him. There is an immediacy and connectivity in Matthews’ practice that articulates something that even a painting cannot – for a painting is about production, and these drawings are not about the artist’s studio or statement: they are about a place and moment in time. Most recently, he has begun pairing his works with videos which offer perhaps the most straightforward documentation of a practice defined by its very indefiniteness, its incalculability, and the presence of video may be more apt to contextualize something beautiful and profound that art-making, even after hours and hours drifting in the ocean, may not be able to fully explain for his viewer.

PETER MATTHEWS (b.1978, Derby, England) lives and works in Leicester, England. He graduated with a BA in Fine Art with honours and an MFA from Nottingham Trent University. Solo exhibitions include ‘The End Is Where They Start From’, BEERS London (2019); Pasaje Montoya, Barcelona, Spain (2018); ‘From the Pacific to the Atlantic’, Strange Cargo, Folkestone, Kent (2017); ‘In Search of the Sublime’, Beers London (2016); ‘Surroundings’, Beers London, (2013); ‘Continuum’, James Cohan Gallery, New York (2011); and ‘Sea Marks’, Mendes Wood DM, Sao Paulo (2011). He was a 2014 finalist in the Francois Schneider Contemporary Talents competition in France. In 2015, he completed an artist resident at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography California, and was also shortlisted on the Sky Arts programme ‘Landscape Artist of the Year’. In 2017 he was awarded the Hugh Casson Drawing Prize at Royal Academy of Arts, London. He was selected for the John Moores Painting Prize in 2018, and also showed a large body of works on paper at the Saatchi Gallery, London in the spring, curated by Sacha Craddock. His works have been collected by the Coppel Collection, The National Maritime Museum, and various other public and private collections internationally and throughout the UK. Matthews’ fair history includes a solo showing with BEERS London at ‘Artissima’, Torino (2016) and a group presentation at Zona Maco, Mexico City (2019). Upcoming exhibitions in 2019 include a major installation at the Royal Museums Greenwich’s National Maritime Museum in June, supported by the Arts Council of England, and an institutional solo show at the Hiroshima City Hall in Japan in the autumn supported by the Daiwa-Anglo Japanese Foundation. Matthews is a 2019 recipient of a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellowship, which will see him undertake a major new body of works across the Pacific and Atlantic coasts of the USA in the summer of 2019.

ANDREW SALGADO

Andrew Salgado’s paintings have evolved greatly in style since first rising to prominence over half a decade ago with his (then) signature large-scale, painterly portraits, where large swathes of colour played across the surface to define his subjects. In his most recent work – the representational has given way to the more abstract: and now such colourful, symbolic, and compositional elements are the driving force of the painted image. While the figures remain a common thread –today Salgado’s subjects are depicted in a fantastical, often ominous tableaux. There are abundant references to the tradition of figurative painting both historic and contemporary: Matisse, Gauguin, and Bacon are all readily recalled; while contemporary greats like Tal R, Daniel Richter, and Peter Doig are also referenced with equal reverie and respect – often like quiet in-jokes for a viewer to catch. The artist’s long-standing tendency to paint clowns and the absurd remain constant (in 2016’s The Fool Makes a Joke at Midnight, the artist had actual circus performers in the exhibition space during the exhibition’s duration), and again one sees faces are painted in bright orange, with purple noses and vibrantly coloured hair. Where there once was a plain background, which placed the figure at the forefront of the image, now there is a kind of harmonious cacophony, a medley of pop-coloured squiggles, harlequin patterns, and wonky block shapes–all of which may seem hastily scribbled if it weren’t for the fact that they slot into one another like an impossibly orchestrated puzzle. Salgado’s more recent works have made a noted effort to distance himself from a 2008 assault (in which he was attacked for being a gay man), and are decidedly certainly more irreverent than his previous offerings: brighter, more celebratory, even theatrical. The artist carries this sense of play into his exhibitions, too. For ‘The Snake’ (BEERS London, 2016), hundreds of butterflies were released to flutter amongst the audience as if they had burst from the artworks themselves; ‘A Room with a View of the Ocean’ (Lauba House, 2017) saw an 8-metre ocean projection (and artificial ‘beach’) on the final room’s wall, inviting the audience to partake in a meditation of what they had seen; and the two-day-only exhibition ‘Nature Boy’ (BEERS London, 2018) saw a pianist (at a baby-grand!) playing the eponymous song on repeat for the entirety of the show’s duration. For Salgado, similar to his increasing use of collaged elements, an exhibition is an opportunity to extend elements of the painting beyond the canvas–an invitation into his world of colour, fantasy, and fun.

ANDREW SALGADO (b. 1982, Regina, Canada) lives and works in London, England. He graduated with an MA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art and Design in 2009, and has since had 13 sold-out solo exhibitions held all over the world, and is widely regarded as one of the UK’s leading young figurative painters. In 2017, Salgado was the youngest artist to ever receive a survey-exhibition at The Canadian High Commission in London, accompanied by a 300-page monograph, both of which were entitled TEN. Previous solo exhibitions include, ‘Blue Rainbow’ Angell Gallery, Toronto, (October 2018); ‘Nature Boy’, Beers London, (2018); ‘Dirty Linen’, Christopher Moller Gallery, Cape Town (2018), ‘A Room with a View of the Ocean’, Lauba Art House, Zagreb (2017); ‘The Snake’, Beers London, (2016); ‘The Fool Makes a Joke at Midnight’, Thierry Goldberg, New York (2016). He has exhibited his work at various international art fairs, including Zona Maco, Mexico City (2019); Pulse Miami (2016); and Volta Basel (2015). In 2015, Salgado curated The Fantasy of Representation, including work by Francis Bacon, Gary Hume, and Hurvin Anderson, with an impassioned manifesto on representational painting. In 2014 he was the subject of a documentary, Storytelling. He has received extensive press both online and in print, including GQ, The Evening Standard, The Independent, Artsy, METRO, Attitude Magazine, Globe and Mail (CAN) and Macleans (CAN). He frequently donates to charities including Pride London, Stonewall, and Diversity Role Models; his donations to the Terrence Higgins Trust are of particular note, having have raised over £75,000 in 5 years. In March 2019, he successfully entered the secondary market with a piece in a Strauss & Co auction in South Africa. Forthcoming solo exhibitions include a booth over Basel Miami (TBA, December 2019); and a fourth solo at BEERS London (October 2020). His works have been collected extensively in private and public collections worldwide.