Flatlands: Exhibition of works by David Batchelor opens at The Fruitmarket Gallery

EDINBURGH.- David Batchelor (born 1955, Dundee) is best known for his vividly-coloured sculptural installations of illuminated lightboxes, industrial dollies, and other found objects. These three-dimensional works perhaps belie the fact that the root of his interest is and always has been in drawing, painting, abstraction and the monochrome – preoccupations that are best charted in his immensely-varied two-dimensional work. This exhibition is the first in-depth presentation of David Batchelor’s drawings and paintings.

Having originally studied painting, Batchelor has, over the last twenty years, made colour his leitmotif. Not the colour found in nature, but the synthetic colour of the illuminated street sign and lurid glare of the nocturnal metropolis. Whether using conventional materials such as pencil, ink, pastel, gouache and acrylic, or highlighter pen, spray or gloss paint and industrial tape; whether making drawings or paintings intended to be simply drawings or paintings or making carefully-plotted diagrams of or proposals for sculpture, Batchelor’s two-dimensional works show how formal rigour and a modernist aesthetic can be subverted by the deployment of intense, exuberant colour.

Hackney Drawing, 2003. Spray paint and adhesive tape on graph paper. Courtesy the artist, Galeria Leme, São Paulo and Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh© David Batchelor, DACS, London, 2013. Photograph: Thierry Bal.

This exhibition represents a first considered attempt to analyse Batchelor’s graphic register by critically reflecting on his use of surface, painting, drawing, and colour. It will present work created over the last two decades, including drawings, paintings, proposals, diagrams and preparatory drawings for sculpture.

The exhibition is curated by Andrea Schlieker, who worked with Batchelor as Director of the Folkestone Triennial in 2008, and will be accompanied by a catalogue with an interview with the artist conducted by Schlieker, and new writing by Fiona Bradley, Director of The Fruitmarket Gallery and internationally renowned writer and curator Rudi Fuchs.

David Batchelor is based in London. He was born in Dundee in 1955. He studied Fine Art at Trent Polytechnic, Nottingham (1975–78), and Cultural Theory at Birmingham University (1978–80).

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