David Batchelor: New Skin for the Old Ceremony, 11 April - 10 May

New Skin for the Old Ceremony expands on a process of ‘medium-translation’ that Batchelor first developed for his exhibition with the gallery in 2022, whereby existing artworks made using paint, torn paper or tape are transformed into new mediums and new processes of working.

Batchelor’s beadworks are at once a return to early interests and a far departure from his studio practice up to this point, which is marked by a sense of immediacy and improvisation. Produced in collaboration with artist Lauren Godfrey and drawing from Batchelor’s Covid Variation compositions made during the pandemic lockdowns, these hand-loomed works slow down and dissect the existing images to the greatest degree. Blocks of colour laid down by a strip of tape or a broad sweep of a paintbrush are reformed, built up again bead by bead.

Each new medium-translation is based upon a plan and a predetermined outcome, but in turn offers new scope for deviation and anomaly. The delicate yet weighty glass beads promise inevitable inconsistencies in colour, and refuse the rigid structure of the grid they are based on, the final, quivering form settling in place by chance.

Batchelor has worked closely with craftspeople in Guadalajara, Marrakech and London to explore the possibilities of new textile-translations. He produced his first quilt works for this exhibition, in collaboration with quilt-maker Catherine-Marie Longtin.

The Covid Variation series are bold geometric images made predominantly with paint or lengths of coloured tape. In these textile works, the textural variations that occur in his habitual materials are pulled to extremes through the variety of natural, synthetic, luxury and technical fabrics sourced from across London.

Throughout his career, Batchelor has taken inspiration from the Concrete art of Brazil, the new modernism that, in a sense, distilled the materials, architecture and vitality of the new concrete cities of the 1950s into clean-cut abstractions.

Batchelor’s artistic practice has often favoured the quick and the improvised. These Concrete Collages, formed of painted and torn sheets of paper, are serendipitous arrangements guided by a sensibility towards colour and composition honed over Batchelor’s career. They filter the spectrums of the city into the purest of forms.

The collages offer a point of reference for the exhibition’s further experimentations in media. From these most fundamental images, Batchelor builds a body of work that is rigid and precise in form, fluid, soft and tactile, and rich in handmade detail.