Meet the new SmartArtists

A preview of the work of five young artists in Whitechapel Gallery’s relaunched London Open exhibition reveal a snapshot of contemporary art at its most cerebral in years, says Ben Luke
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3 July 2012

The Whitechapel Gallery has reinvented its summer show. It used to focus on local artists from east London but this year the new London Open invited submissions citywide, aiming to take a snapshot of the latest trends on the capital’s art scene. Planned as a triennial survey of new work by anyone over 26 from across the city, the final show was selected by an art-serious, non-celebrity jury, including the artist Rodney Graham as well as curators and a collector.

The original show had been going since the Sixties (even before that, in another guise) but it gained momentum as the Whitechapel Open in the late Seventies and Eighties, showing Anish Kapoor, Antony Gormley and Rachel Whiteread early in their careers and becoming a barometer of new art in London in the process. But more recently, the Turner Prize and then Beck’s Futures became sexier adverts for contemporary art, thanks to the added ingredients of competition and cash.

Beck’s Futures is long gone, however, and the Turner Prize has lost its youthful edge — the average age of a Turner Prize nominee in its mid-Nineties heyday was 35, now it is 43. There is a vacancy for a regular talent-spotting, trendsetting event in the art calendar which the London Open could fill.

So what does this year’s show, of 35 artists selected from 1,800 hopefuls, have to tell us about what’s new in 2012? A quick survey of five bright young things reveals a great range and diversity — conceptualism still rules, though there’s one painter here, proudly dedicating himself to the age-old struggle with oil and canvas. No medium or style is dominant, but they are a distinctly cerebral bunch, and their sensibility is one of quiet maturity — their often quiet and eccentric takes on the world contrast with punky up-yours attitude and striking advertising-inspired imagery of the Nineties.

Pio Abad

Born in Manila in the Philippines, 28-year-old Pio Abad has just finished his postgraduate course at the Royal Academy. His three large photographs in the show are from a series he describes as “an artificial history of Orientalist architecture told through perfume bottles”.

He buys them in Whitechapel market and has about 50 examples, all clichéd representations of the Middle East “in plastic, kitsch form”. They often refer to “monumental things”, he says, “like palaces, or the Burj [Dubai’s version of the Shard].

Abad, who lives in Peckham, also shows a Versace-like scarf including images of Saddam Hussein’s golden Gatling guns, a penchant of tyrants for what the artist calls the “tropical baroque” style — all mock-rococo, dripping with gold. “It is all about zooming out further and further, and realising that you are in this mess that is contemporary life.”

Rehana Zaman

The Archers is an unlikely inspiration for a young Hackney-dwelling artist, but the radio soap triggered Rehana Zaman’s 2011 video, Iron Maiden (Ambridge).

We see an Asian woman, right, being interviewed, expressing an enjoyment of TV dramas, for instance, before the film fades to black and a male narrator analyses the taste, character and “colonial English” voice of Archers character Usha Gupta. We are never sure how the two aspects connect.

“It is set up as a bit of a riddle,” says Zaman, who wanted to explore the impressions we form when we are presented with characters, especially through film or documentary. Using text, performance and video, she tries to approach weighty themes like gender and identity politics “in a way that surreptitiously taps you on the shoulder as opposed to knocking you on the head with a hammer”.

Zaman, who is 30, followed Damien Hirst in studying at Leeds Art College and then Goldsmiths.

Nikolai Ishchuk

Moscow-born Ishchuk dissects the medium of photography. He is clearly passionate about its techniques, and as happy printing in a Brixton darkroom as he is working with PhotoShop on his computer at home in Bayswater.

His London Open project, Offset, fuses analogue and digital. The 30-year-old uses his family’s and friends’ snapshots, cutting them down the middle, reassembling them and manipulating them digitally so that the image at the heart of a photograph — of couples kissing or dancing — is cleaved apart and placed at the edges, leaving a central void.

The series was inspired by fractured relationships. “It starts with the premise that the family album is a visual trap,” Ishchuk says.

“The print, this little thing, is not enough to understand what’s really going on.”

Alongside the photographs are black and white drawings based on the negative spaces left by his separation of the couples.

“They come out looking like crumbling pillars, which goes back to the idea of communication and closeness being a pillar that is supposed to properly support a relationship.”

Dale Carney

“Painting, for me, invites struggle,” says Dale Carney, the London Open’s only true painter. The

27-year-old Torquay-born artist’s canvases are laden with thick layers of oil, in which masks, eyes and other symbols encrust the surface like jumbled hieroglyphics.

“It is a mixture of the outside and the inner world,” he says, “but paint is liquid colour — there are no bounds to what you can do with it.” Each painting takes him months, and costs hundreds, as he goes through tube after tube of paint, until finally he reaches “a certain kind of music or tone” and the work is done.

Beth Collar

Beth Collar’s enigmatic video Mediaeval Window (2011) captures a woman awkwardly and monotonously describing a battle, framed in an arched window shape on an otherwise black screen and dressed in a wimple and decorative tunic, with a microphone and a script in her hands.

It is a bizarre scene, possibly from a battle re-enactment but we are not certain — and Collar, 28, enjoys this ambiguity. “What I like about the result is that people are unsure about whether I am the woman, whether it is a script I have written, whether it is something I have set up, or if it is a real event,” she says. Her work takes many forms, from performance to drawing, but underlying it all is a strong interest in history, “how we look at the past and how we filter it for us now”.

The London Open is at Whitechapel Gallery, E1 (020 7522 7888; whitechapelgallery.org) from tomorrow until September 14.

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