David Osbaldeston, The Pleasure of Your Company, 2008. Series of 57 etchings. Courtesy the artist and Matt's Gallery, London
A cumulative lists of all artists and projects involved in Nought to Sixty.
Nought to Sixty presents sixty projects by emerging artists based in Britain and Ireland over six months from 5 May to 2 November 2008.
Most of the artists in Nought to Sixty are under thirty-five, few of them have had significant commercial exposure, and in most cases this is their first opportunity to mount a solo project in a major public space.
The season is not intended to announce any new generation or style, but to build up a multifaceted portrait of the emerging art scene in the two countries, and to provide a space for exchange.
The Nought to Sixty programme consists of:
Events happen at the ICA every Monday night:
Sign up for regular updates about the Nought to Sixty and the rest of the ICA's programme, special events and offers. It's free.
Nought to Sixty is supported by:
Other partners:
Osbaldeston’s work is concerned with the production, positioning and reception of art.
David Osbaldeston is in the Upper Galleries from 15 - 22 September
The work of David Osbaldeston (born Middlesbrough, 1968, lives in Manchester and Glasgow) has a seductive air of familiarity. His subject matter not only slips neatly into the space between art and life, but also articulates the strangeness of reconstructing the past through the eyes of the present, which will itself inevitably slip away. Using drawing, woodcut and etching – an anachronistic, perhaps redundant, method of production – Osbaldeston produces work that resists assimilation, and which instead explores the creative space between original and copy. His practice appears to draw on his audience's nostalgia for certain phenomena, including the rationalist aesthetics of modernism. Osbaldeston's projects interrogate the galleries in which they are situated, and the support structures that surround such cultural sites. For his Matt's Gallery exhibition, Your Answer Is Mine (2006), the artist created a billboard-sized etching that resembled a giant photocopy, and which was meticulously constructed from an absurd array of self-penned ideological pronouncements. His recent exhibition Another Shadow Fight (2008), at International Project Space, involved posters influenced by an eclectic range of sources, including the polemical writings of Wyndham Lewis and a series of works by artist Sidney Nolan. The posters were used to construct a dilapidated version of a newspaper kiosk, one originally designed by Bauhaus pioneer Herbert Bayer.
For Nought to Sixty Osbaldeston presents The Pleasure of Your Company (2008), which consists of a series of 57 etchings. The different works reproduce invitation cards for projects at ICA, dating from the year of its first solo show in 1950 to 2007. The events range from a James Joyce poetry recital in 1950, to exhibitions by artists such as Francis Bacon, Pablo Picasso, Barbara Kruger, Mike Kelley and Cerith Wyn Evans. Osbaldeston's works are reconstructed 'ghosts' of the originals, and are produced in an edition of one (plus one artist's proof), thus negating the commodification usually inherent within editioned work. Such works expose the labouriousness of his endeavour and what Osbaldeston describes as an absurd counter to the logic of the globalised economy.
Osbaldeston's decision to research the archive of the ICA, and to re-work old preview cards, enables him to present a visual commentary on the organisation's history – and to comment, in part, on the anniversary celebrations of which Nought to Sixty is a feature. Osbaldeston charts the evolution of the invitations, items which are complex signifiers of their time, and which raise issues such as the elitist nature of the art community. What also becomes apparent within his critique is the often conservative and generic design of the cards, which – together with the ICA's shifting corporate identity – bring into question the assumed 'progressive' nature of the institution. Finally, there is a subtle humour present in the week-long exhibition encapsulating and recirculating the images accumulated over 57 years.
Matthew Williams
Nought to Sixty in Pictures: David Osbaldeston
Why an institution of contemporary art(s) like this, and not any other?
Artist-led organisations that support networks of emerging art in England outside London.
Photos of the projects, artists and audiences taking part in Nought to Sixty.
Nought to Sixty includes a series of monthly discussions that address the networks that form and contribute to an emerging scene.