May - June 2010

David Webb

This exhibition of new work by David Webb brings together two themes. Firstly his continuing responses to family stories of travel and secondly paintings based on drawings and memories of three recent trips to the United States and Latin America. What connects the ideas are Webb's use of colour to make natural light and space, and distinct shapes that re-form the realities he bases his work upon. The resulting images are not referential but aim to seem familiar, intimate and personal with a strong sense of place and allusion to narrative.

March - April 2010

Paul Marks

Trance is a wall hung structure comprised of sixteen, painted curved plywood modules. Measuring 4.8mtrs in length it peels off the gallery wall, embracing the space of the viewer, promoting continuous movement to engage with its arena-like qualities. Light plays and undulates across the brilliant, ridged painted surface, revealing graduated, rather than uniform colour. The drama of the interchange we all experience within the built environment is articulated in this piece.

Through the seductive visuality of this work, emerges an ongoing interest of Paul's which is the notion of the modular unit as a discrete 'component of growth'. With its potential for accumulation, not only a standard unit but as an element with individual characteristics, creating a synergy or inter connectedness of the part to the whole.

January - February 2010

Nicholas Middleton

Nicholas Middleton's current practice is primarily concerned with photographically based paintings. These vary from straight forward images translated into paint to paintings of planned and constructed tableaux. His paintings have developed a documentary form: a naturalist mode of representation with narrative intentions, drawing on influences from both the history of Western painting and documentary photography. Within these paintings several strands of interlocking concerns have emerged, which could be broadly defined as: documenting aspects of civic life and urbanism; the reflection of individuals in an absoptive moment, interacting with their environments; how we negotiate our living in different cities.

November - December 2009

Takako Hasegawa

Obsessed with the unseen and unconscious systems of the city and its people, Takako Hasegawa works in a variety of media to decode and expose the anatomy of the ordinary and mundane. Her site-specific response to the space comes from her background in architecture, operating on its peripheries with art and performance.

October - November 2009

Paul Marks

Split into two parts, this exhibition brings together works made in a variety of media over the last ten years. The connection for Part 1 is 'the non-physical' & for Part 2 'the physical'.

Included in this second part are three recent paintings. 'Untitled sex act No.1' is a fragment edited from a sexually explicit image, magnified so that each pixel is painted as a 20mm square. Any trace of the original content is lost leaving an abstract painting. 'She suffers beautifully' & 'Forever yours' are edited from S&M images and undergo the same process, although when viewed through a phone camera begin to reveal the original photographic content.

September - October 2009

Selected Open

ARCH launched an annual contemporary Open for the Deptford X Arts festival. Nine artists all living or working in South East London were selected from an open submission to exhibit one piece of work each. Visitors to the gallery during Deptford X were invited to vote for their favourite work. The artist receiving the most votes by the end of the festival was awarded a solo show at the gallery to be held in 2010.

The selected artists were : Alan McQuillan, Anca Elena Untaru, Arnold Dobbs, Audrey Tan, Dale Wilson, Gillian Golding, Glen Wild, Linda Gomez, Victoria Scott.

Dale Wilson won the public vote.

August - September 2009

Paul Marks

Split into two parts, this exhibition brings together works made in a variety of media over the last ten years. The connection for Part 1 is 'the non-physical' & for Part 2 'the physical'.

The centre piece of Part 1 is a diptych 'Transmitter / Receiver' these large scale wall hung painted structures peel away from the wall enveloping and activating the space. Painted black and white like a positive and a negative they offer an opportunity for contemplation without a narrative.

July - August 2009

Annie Freud

Artist & poet Annie Freud is the daughter of renowned painter Lucian Freud. She has received much attention in recent years for her poetry. Forty-six years is her first solo show combining an eclectic mix of paintings, drawings and embroideries dating from her teens in the sixties to the present. These are all very personal pieces, most of whch have never been shown publicly before.

June - July 2009

Paul Marks

The butterfly effect is a phrase used to describe changes to the initial conditions of interdependent, complex systems in Chaos Theory. Humans, economic & social structures, nervous systems and climate are all examples of such systems. This term, first made popular by Edward Lorenz in the 1960s relates to the idea that a butterfly's wings could cause small changes in the atmosphere, that may ultimately alter the path of a tornado. The flapping wing causes a small change in the initial condition, the effect of which results in a chain reaction leading to major changes in the system.

Paul Marks continues to explore the notion of interdependence in his work with this new body of drawings. Each drawing is composed from hundreds of free-hand lines, drawn directly onto a painted canvas. Each line is influenced by the previous one and therefore has an effect on the next. Each line is unique with individual properties, but clearly cannot exist on its own. These drawings, that all start with a single straight line, gradually evolve into wildly exaggerated forms.

May 2009

Penny Hamblin

In her first solo exhibition at ARCH, London based artist Penny Hamblin is showing a group of abstract paintings from an on-going series. These works draw on her obsession with the elements of sky and water in her work, which she states is partly fuelled by living near the River Thames. The Thames presents us with a powerful symbol of nature in our lives in a modern metropolis, running through the heart of our city.

Many artists have depicted vistas along the Thames, where mans endeavors meet nature. Hamblin explores this idea, offering us the notion as seen through the eyes of the viewer, always looking outwards, towards this distant horizon, with the picture plane acting as the viewing point.

November - January 2009

Paul Marks

Vibrations is a generic title for an on-going series of mosaic panels begun by Paul Marks in 2003. Each panel shares a common formula, consisting of concentric circles that collide and merge. Marks's aim was to develop a single repetitive idea that can be endlessly explored. The resulting colour relationships give each panel a character that seems to remind us of somewhere, sometime or something. But, like a vague glimpse of a past experience, it is just a fleeting feeling. The variegated surfaces and reflectivity of the individual glass cubes pull you back to their material nature.

September - October 2008

Bea Denton : Patrick Semple : Paul Marks

''The unexamined life is not worth living'' - Socrates

All of our choices in life come at a cost, at the very least, the loss of the path not chosen. And they change us. Marxian economics would have it that the value of a thing is defined by the materials and the man-hours that made it. But a rich man in the desert will pay a great deal for a glass of water. And some people will happily wage war over trifles. People give their lives for those they love. Paradoxically it seems that the things worth living for are also the things worth dying for. Never mind the news that the ''real cost of living'' may be up 10% on last year, the real cost of living maybe greater still. It depends on what you mean by life and it depends on where you draw the line.

Read full text by Patrick Semple here