The Breakfast Club

Haunch of Venison presents The Breakfast Club, a group show and final farewell to the gallery’s Bruton Street space. Taking inspiration from the cult eighties film, ranging across all mediums and a wide spectrum of subjects, the sixteen London-based, emerging artists embrace the spirit of freedom from institutional control.

Ranging across all mediums and a wide spectrum of subjects, the highly varied work of the participating artists provides a snapshot of London’s pluralistic contemporary scene. Shane Bradford, recent winner of the Celeste Painting prize, presents Swarm Intelligence conceived with The Breakfast Club (exhibition and film) in mind. In tandem with the customary ‘dipping’ process, the work formalises ideas of identity, individuality, and ‘the group’, for the purpose of creating a new fictional whole.

Eloise Fornieles creates highly charged and powerfully aesthetic performances that focus on creating one-on-one interactions. The piece plays with the nature of telephone conversation; be it a professional exchange, phone sex or a survey call. As the conversations unravel the dynamics of pleasure, consumption and loss are discovered. Davide Minuti’s sculpture Still (Sometimes) appears to be keeping the floor and ceiling apart as if they were quarrelling lovers. In a poetic gesture his sculpture measures the force between two parts and cushions the consequence.

Thomas Kratz’s paintings draw on loose, gestural painting and iconography. In this show Kratz has turned from the contemporary mobile smiley to the soft ‘vertical smile’ reminiscent of Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du monde (The Origin of the World). Matt McQuillan has presented an equation of transferring energy from a previous installation to the current one, which quite literally illuminates the nature of documentation.

The Breakfast Club is an opportunity to experience the artworks of the princess, the athlete, the brain, the criminal and the basket case in an exhibition which celebrates what it is to be different.

The Breakfast Club

mit Shane Bradford, Paul Carter, Kevin David, Zeyad Dajani, Eloise Fornieles, Deklan Kilfeather, Thomas Kratz, Paul Lewis, Matt McQuillan, Davide Minuti, Ruairiadh O'Connell, Nick Packer, Caroline Russell, Stuart Taylor, Matt Watkins