DONT FRET

The Greatest The City Could Offer Me
Was A Stranger

STOUR SPACE GALLERY

04.11.2020

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Based in Chicago, Don't Fret is most well-known for his wheat-pasting practice but also paints, draws, sculpts and performs. He has produced large-scale murals in Chicago, New York, Miami, San Francisco and Denver as well as internationally in cities like London, São Paulo, Helsinki, and Berlin.

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A street artist, Don't Fret has nonetheless been exhibited in numerous galleries all over the world. His career allows him to produce art that is at the crossroad between practices, humour and critique, the street and the gallery. Inspired by pop culture and cartoons, he offers uncompromising political commentaries on contemporary society’s flaws. He expresses an honest and introspective standpoint which makes his practice unique.

Known as the Gentle Sculptor of Hackney Wick, Olivier makes poetic, round shaped sculptures, intuitively made by hand by intertwining accessible materials such as lime, sand, plants and found objects.

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His aim is to engage with his audience through memory and emotion leading an ongoing conversation about ambiguous loss, uncertainty and unfinishedness. Olivier believes that sculpture is accessible to all through using simple materials that can be bought at builders’ merchants, or even found in your street.

His sculptures create a dialogue with the audience through the sense of touch which allows to connect with our environment in a way that is impossible to our eyes. Olivier Adam creates an eternal cycle allowing the nature to become a part of the artworks or if those do come to an end, they gradually dissolve back into nature.

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The exhibition displays oil paintings that were created during the last twenty years of Terence Williams’s artistic practice.

The works presented are divided into overlapping bodies of work entitled: Life Drawing Sketches, Click, Beach and Political.

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The majority of the works on display are connected by the democratic use of images collated from magazines, newspapers and the internet that propagate and characterise collective memories of Western societies during the 20th Century.

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The images are deliberately altered via a process of collage and painting to create new compositions that consciously evoke alternate narratives as a method to subvert or dispose of the original intention of the image and give the material a new existence.

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On 6th August we opened photographer Steve Pulvernis's exhibition 'The Ever Changing Past' - an analogue hand printed collection at Stour Space Gallery.

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Working as a professional photographer during the 1990s, it was in the darkroom where Steven found his niche; working with monochrome negatives.

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The theme of this body of work is centred on street art within the context of streamline architecture of old and new through east London; concentrating on two main areas, Hackney Wick and Nomadic Gardens (RIP).

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With their ever-changing canvas and a wealth of both old and new structures, Steve searches for the angles to create the most aesthetic image. For him, cropping of the square Hasselblad negatives in the darkroom and composition are vital definitions of his photographic practice.

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