THEMES AND VARIATIONS
Julia Farrer and Ian Tyson
28 May - 21 June 2004

Themes and Variations brings together two artists who share a passion for geometry. In two dimensional works on paper and paintings and three dimensional sculpture and book works Farrer and Tyson explore and play with the rules of form.

Farrer’s paintings have been described by the architectural critic Andrew Mead as alluding to the Deconstructionist designs of Daniel Libeskind and Peter Eisenman ‘with their abruptly-angled walls, their folded planes, their cuts and disrupted grids’. The work has moved progressively from experiments with illusory space within a flat picture plane towards a way of painting which combines a painted surface with shaped relief supports. A major new work Crossing Point 2004 (over 2m in length) evolved from an initially simple configuration of two intersecting rectangles but the shapes have been transmuted into an enormously complex arrangement of spectral spaces and transparent layers.

Ian Tyson is one of Britain’s foremost practioners of the livre d’artiste and has exhibited his work internationally for over thirty years. His books
combine a minimalist sculptural aesthetic with a deep understanding of typography and print and he has worked in collaboration with many contemporary writers, including a long association with the American poet Jerome Rothenberg. Tyson shows a series of related sculptures and printworks alongside two books which were completed last year. Schema reworks a poem by Laotse with a sequence of four screenprints, while Vert(ical) utilises digital print in a sequence of abstract images with both books housed in an edition of individual sculptures.

The exhibition revisits elements of a previous collaboration between the two artists, entitled Partworks which resulted in a series of artists books and prints in a range of media from etching, letterpress and collage to screen print and four colour litho. Books from the Partworks collaboration have recently been shown in major exhibitions at the Gutenberg Museum, Mainz and the University of California at San Diego.

Catalogues available:

Julia Farrer: Towers and Bridges 2002, Eagle Gallery (text Andrew Mead)
Ian Tyson/ Jerome Rothenberg : Collaborations Livres d’artiste 1968 -2003,
Eric Linard Galerie