Output details

Supercollage – A solo exhibition of collage works

Using practice as research Bainbridge’s focus here is an exploration of current fashion and lifestyle magazines in a period post newsprint and computer technology. Through the method of collage (a technique associated with modernism throughout the 20C, and chosen to extend Bainbridge's research into modernism and the everyday through sculpture), Bainbridge reconstructs images and landscapes to examine the complex construction of fashion plates, advertising and 'good living' imagery, now printed with high definition detail and colour. Barbara Casavecchia writes in Art Review, (26 Feb 2010), "While the ads' testimonials are to bodies whose visibility and neatness are extreme, almost obscene, and heavily Photoshopped in order to hide all imperfections and signs of ageing, their repressed, but here revealed, furry side subverts such sanitation".

A large exhibition of 100 works was the first showing of this work, in Galleria Caroline+Salvatore Ala, Milan (11 Dec 2009 - 13 Feb 2010), preeminent in showing important contemporary art from Europe and the USA. J Griffin writes in, 'Tales of Everyday Madness' Frieze issue 123 (May 2009), that ‘even the most exotic, fancy objects conceal the mundane and familiar, and conversely, that the things closest to home can occasionally reveal themselves to be strange, foreign and unknowable'. The exhibition was widely reported including in Art Review (Issue 39), La Repubblica, (12 Dec 2010). Following this exhibition elements of this work were shown at Workplace Gallery, Gateshead as part of the group exhibition 'Psychic Geography' (2010), 'The Armory Show' NY (Jan 2010), and Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, London (2011). A solo exhibition at New Art Gallery, Walsall (May - July 2012), coincided with the publication of Eric Bainbridge – Collages (ISBN 978 1 907363 01 6) also published by New Art Gallery, Walsall and distributed by Cornerhouse.