GATESHEAD.- BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead is presenting new works created by the recipients of the inaugural BALTIC Artists’ Award 2017, a major international prize for emerging contemporary artists.
The four recipients, Jose Dávila, Eric N. Mack, Toni Schmale and Shen Xin, have each been awarded £25,000 to create new work for a 13-week exhibition and a £5,000 artist fee. The exhibition, presented across BALTIC’s Level 3 and Level 4 galleries, provides a vital opportunity for the artists to have their work seen by tens of thousands of visitors.
Public visitors to the exhibition will be able to vote for the artists’ presentation they have the greatest connection to. This will inform an additional legacy commission project enabling a deeper engagement between one of the artists and local communities in Gateshead, to be announced in 2018.
The four award winning artists have each been nominated by a celebrated international contemporary artist - Monica Bonvicini, Mike Nelson, Pedro Cabrita Reis, and Lorna Simpson. Each has selected an artist they believe deserves an international platform and a springboard moment in their career.
Mexican artist, Jose Dávila was selected by Pedro Cabrita Reis. In an ongoing series of sculptural and spatial investigations, Dávila considers how objects engage with and occupy space, and how they interact with their social and physical environment. For the BALTIC exhibition, Dávila has worked with local fabricators to make a series of site-specific sculptural works in response to the architecture of the gallery. Playfully suspended, the heavy pieces create a sense of tension as they appear as in slow free-fall. The materials he has chosen, including steel beams, are a reference to Gateshead’s industrial past. By combining natural and manufactured objects, the artist encourages us to look at the materials he has arranged in a new context.
Eric N. Mack was selected by Lorna Simpson. Mack presents a selection of abstract works that explore the nature of painting. Blankets are collaged together with other fragments of everyday objects, including textiles and previously worn garments, magazine cuttings and paper, coming together in a new context as a surface for paint. Quilted moving blankets that are used to project objects in transit are a recurring material. They suggest care and domesticity, and touch on the nomadic reality of New York based-artists, where Mack lives and works. Frameworks and fastenings are used to pull Mack’s paintings away from the wall so that they operate in several dimensions, and escape the confines of a frame. There is a balance between flexibility and stiffness in Mack’s work, and a tension between materials that give them their dynamism.
Toni Schmale was selected by Monica Bonvicini. Exhibiting for the first time in the UK, Schmale has brought new work together in BALTIC’s Level 3 Gallery with sculptural works from the series fuhrpark. was das / der neue gefahrt sein kann (car fleet. what the new vehicle / companion could be) 2015. The overall installation is arranged carefully to influence how the audience interacts both with the architecture of the gallery and the works on display, producing a tense and unsettling atmosphere. The machine-like quality of Schmale’s sculptures investigates key ideas related to gender roles and hierarchies within society, highlighting how assumptions and categories are reinforced by the objects we live with. Some of the works evoke the aesthetic of a fitness studio, with the absence of the body producing a disquieting environment.
Shen Xin, originally from China and now living and working in London, was selected by Mike Nelson. Shen’s major new work, Provocation of the Nightingale 2017, is a multi-screen video installation exploring the artist’s acute observation of collective memory and personal relationships. The work is presented in BALTIC’s Level 3 Gallery as a four-screen environment, with a kaleidoscope-like effect of shifting perspectives and a soundtrack that overlaps and repeats. Underpinning Shen’s work is an investigation into systems of belief and power, and the assimilation of Buddhism into various cultural contexts. With no overarching narrative, Provocation of the Nightingale is both a metaphysical journey and a sensory, ethereal experience, encouraging the viewer to move between screens, tracing an impression across all four surfaces.
Laurence Sillars, Chief Curator, BALTIC said: "Amidst the many awards available to artists, which can undoubtedly transform careers at critical moments, we wanted to create a platform that prioritised the support to make new work and, crucially, to do this within an environment where there were no losers. Each of the artists nominated for the BALTIC Artists’ Award has won."
"In its first iteration, it has been so rewarding to see the dialogues between the artists - our nominators and our winners – evolve, and it is this informal, yet vital, network of mentoring between artists that we are also glad to celebrate. The exhibition at BALTIC will give significant exposure to these four artists’ work and we look forward to seeing further dialogues grow between this work and our visitors."
