George Barber 2010 UK
George Barber will talk about his work and relate it to trends in art and in the use of video today. The lecture will show examples and also respond to questions about distribution, funding, and galleries.
had a one month solo show at the Marc De Puechredon Gallery in Basel last month and his ‘Automotive Action Painting’ was also shown at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in London last year. He has recently had work at Waterside Projects, FormContent, Primo Alonsi Gallery, and soon at the Whitechapel and a solo show at Dundee Contemporary Arts. He had an installation at Tate Britain in 2006 and a show of his video sculptures, ‘The Long Commute’ at Jack the Pelican Presents Gallery Brooklyn, New York 2008. He has been part of numerous programmes at Tate Modern and had retrospectives at the ICA, New York Film & Video Festival and at La Rochelle Festival, France. He has been written about by Paul Morley and Gareth Evans, the Time Out & Vertigo magazine critic and glowingly in Art Forum by Ed Halter and in Art Monthly by Martin Herbert. His recent found footage work, “Following Your Heart”, “Welcome” and “Autumn” use off-air adverts and TV films, mostly American. The central conceit is to take found footage and manipulate it into a new artistic experience. The adverts and dramas all essentially present clichéd dialogue but by the use of repetition, music, the work rises away from being humdrum television into something more effecting. His “Automotive Action Painting” won First Prize at the 24th Hamburg International Short Film Festival in June 2008 and has inspired a recent BMW Z4 advert where the sports car drives through paint to make a painting.