Hew Locke and Diana Cooper

The practice of both artists is characterised by the act of drawing, moving off the page and into three dimensions.

Diana Cooper will be making Orange Alert, a room-sized installation that is a response to the terror alert colour coding system. Cooper is interested in the attempt to colour-code fear and uses the code’s five colours in her piece. Most of Cooper’s works activate the interface between the second and third dimension and in so doing embrace the terms of reference of painting, sculpture and installation. Her process – probing and circuitous – and the finished works – resembling architectural models and circuit boards – address feelings of information overload, vulnerability, loss of orientation and the compression of time and space experienced in contemporary life.

Hew Locke’s recent iconographic works of Royalty festooned with plastic guns, swords, lizards, spiders and flowers have gained him considerable attention. Locke’s new works explore the crossover between these works and earlier cardboard pieces such as ‘Cardboard Palace’ and ‘Hemmed In’. These vast sculptures are constructed from overlapping planes of packing-case cardboard whose surfaces have been covered with drawn gestures using a knife, black marker and white paint. In a new commission another trademark of Royalty - the Coat of Arms - becomes a cut out embellished with corrugated plastic, its details delineated in sequins and fabric trim. These works reflect Locke’s interest in exploring the notion of invented or constructed culture that stems from his upbringing in post-colonial Guyana, with its clash of cultures and styles.

Diana Cooper was born in 1964 and lives in New York City. She has shown extensively in Europe and the United States and has just completed a Prix du Rome at the American Academy in Rome. Hew Locke was born in 1959 in Scotland, lived in Guyana from 1965 to 1980 and now lives in London. He had a solo exhibition at Chisenhale Gallery, London, in 2002 and currently has a solo exhibition touring the Luckman Gallery, Los Angeles and Atlanta Contemporary Art Center.

This exhibition is a collaboration between The Drawing Room and the Centre for Drawing at Wimbledon School of Art. A catalogue will be available.

This exhibition is financially supported by the Arts Council of Wales.

Pressetext

Hew Locke and Diana Cooper