Output details

"Phantasieblume". A series of “paintings” and “drawings” featuring delicate and sometimes intricately cut skins of paint that explore the relationship between fine art and craft alongside ongoing research into romantic idealization and representations of desire, longing and loss. Solo exhibitions at Centre for Recent Drawing (C4RD), London 2009; Vane Gallery, Newcastle 2010; Hå gamle prestegard, Hå Kommune, Stavanger, Norway 2011. With additional Solo presentation at Volta Art fair, Basel , Switzerland (2012). Group exhibitions at The Drawing Gallery, Walford (2009); Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (2010); Burton Art Gallery and Museum, Bideford (2011); Blythe Gallery, Imperial College London (2011); Fruehsorge contemporary drawings, Berlin (2011), C4RD, London (2012).

In Phantasieblume, Fox continued his research into cultural representations of romantic idealisation and desire, longing, seduction, romance and loss. The project explores how parallels and equivalencies between the subject of the research and the practical approaches developed to making the drawing and painting can extend the possible readings of the work. Using Art Historical and cultural reference points, it interrogates the intersections, boundaries and interrelationships between Fine Art and craft practices, with a view to exploring the potential significance of deliberately blurring these boundaries.

The research draws on a set of reference points, including Neclassical painting, Victoriana, pornography and, centrally, reconfigures Kate Greenaway’s 1884 ‘dictionary’ of floriographic sub-cultural courtship codes, ‘the language of flowers’, constructing new double meanings and assigning a personal, contemporary currency to these codes.

Working with ‘skins’ formed of multiple layers of ink and acrylic paint painted onto glass (and then peeled off), Fox developed an innovative, but appropriately time-consuming cutting process, that through its evident (‘symbolic’) devotion to craft and labour, mirrored other ideas about ‘devotion’ expressed elsewhere in the project. The intricately cut ‘drawings’ questioned the usual ways that the mediums of ink and paint are used, suggesting other possibilities that draw closely on approaches usually associated with craft process: the importance of labour and notions of a ‘meditative’ interrelationship between hand and mind.

The research was presented as a series of solo exhibitions with an accompanying monograph co-published by Art Editions North/C4RD. Individual and groups of works from the project were also exhibited separately, for example in specialist group exhibitions at Fruehsorge Contemporary Drawings, Berlin and Burton Art Gallery & Museum, highlighting different aspects of the research. The painting Metatopia was awarded a major prize in the John Moores Contemporary Painting Prize, subsequently acquired for the collection of the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.