BENDER$PACE

Dan Mitchell / Richard Parry

with thanks to Chinami Saki

The corrosive thread of Fear is woven through the post-modern fabric of our lives.

As humans we - in turn - seek to protect ourselves from pain and hunt out our pleasures.

We have turned to embrace the lion.

- Dan Mitchell, September - 16th 2010

If a Lion could talk, we could not understand him

- Ludwig Wittgenstein - Wittgenstein - 1953

What’s a Lion?

- Richard Parry - September 17th 2010

Unsurprisingly, both Dan Mitchell and Richard Parry have exhibited together before. Both artists’ work will soak up your attention, instantly captivating you from the very first viewing. Whilst each artist adopts a very different approach to making absorbing, almost minimal sculpture and films, their use of conceptually porous materials means that their work naturally complements each other. Though their reasons for exhibiting together are purely instinctive, one will immediately know that the work is excellent. To say too much about it would be superfluous, as the real joy within their work is the chance encounter. There is nothing of the spectacle to advertise, (except the pre-official launch of their new artist-designed Beck’s beer labels at the Private View!) nothing unnecessary in the work’s production, only the infinite translations and interpretations that we each bring to their critically absorbent surfaces and the memories triggered by the recycled formalism of the Lionic material. What is left unsaid is almost more important.

London-based Dan Mitchell received his BA in Fine Art at Kingston (1989). Recent exhibitions include Zodiac 3000 at The International Project Space in Birmingham and Crash: Homage to J G Ballard at the Gagosian Gallery in London.

Richard Parry (Born Hull 1983) received his BA in Fine Art / History of Art at Goldsmiths (2006). Recent solo exhibitions include I’m having a show at mot, I’m well cool at MOT International in London and Art Zimbabwe, at The National Gallery of Art, Harare.

This October, in what supposedly is the most important week in the London Contemporary Art calendar, both Richard and Dan will be exhibiting works at Christie's, 85 Old Brompton Road, London, with The New Dome,