Reload II

The Same For Everyone, Summer programme

22. 7. – 5. 9. 2020

Parafin Gallery, London

Reload II

The Same For Everyone

Taking a cue from Nathan Coley's seminal text work, currently on display in London as part of ‘Sculpture in The City’, Parafin’s summer programme creates a series of shifting dialogues and encounters between works by the artists the gallery represents. Coley’s work highlights the ambiguity of language, and can be read as a statement of fact, an exhortation, a critique or even a lament, and this series of staged encounters will be similarly open. Multiple potential meanings are produced by changing contexts. Every week a different group of works will be placed ‘in focus’ in the front part of the gallery's main space, while the rest of the gallery will be given over to an ongoing group hang.

Week 4: Hynek Martinec and Justin Mortimer

12 – 15 August 2020

The fourth chapter of Parafin’s summer programme explores the vanitas theme by juxtaposing works by two leading figurative painters, Hynek Martinec and Justin Mortimer. A group of Martinec’s paintings of skulls, the classic memento morisymbol, confront paintings of dead and dying flowers from Mortimer's ‘Breed’ and ‘Taxa’ series. Like Martinec’s recent works, these paintings by Mortimer subvert and reimagine classical genres, in this case still life and flower painting, creating fragmented moments of heightened reality juxtaposed with fluidly abstract backgrounds. Mortimer's ‘Breed’ and ‘Taxa’ series are meditations on mortality but also address the dialectic relationship between abstraction and realism in painting. In a similar way, Martinec’s The Flaying of Marsyas (2019) depicts a horse skull that seemingly hovers halfway between life and death, and is set before the backdrop of a vast Icelandic glacier.

Nathan Coley’s text work, which is the cue for this ongoing series of encounters, in this context becomes itself a kind of vanitas, suggesting that death comes to us all in the end.