Immortal Nature: Piers Secunda at Edel Assanti

Painter and sculptor Piers Secunda featured in Edel Assanti Gallery exhibition exploring modern apocalyptic anxieties

Following a ground-breaking solo show at the Aubin Gallery, Piers Secunda presents his politically explosive painting in a group exhibition exploring the prophesised end of the world in 2012, curated by Gordon Cheung.

Encompassing a range of media, Immortal Nature is split across Edel Assanti’s three floors, invoking the mythological prism of the Underworld, Earth and the Afterlife. These distinct realms investigate the tensions, conflicts and hopes surrounding civilisation’s ever-changing relationship with the natural world. International contemporary artists, Laurence Edwards, Robin Friend, Alex Honda, Nicolai Howalt, Hew Locke, Rui Matunaga, Richard Mosse and Kelly Richardson will be exhibiting alongside Piers Secunda and the curator Gordon Cheung.

The Earth floor poses a violent depiction of present day reality. Piers Secunda’s solid slabs of paint bear dramatic testimony to the instant in which they were fired upon by soldiers of the army of the People’s Republic of China. To create this highly charged work, the artist ventured into a Chinese military base, taking considerable risks to seize in paint the moment when a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) bullet connects with its target.

Echoing Ai Wei Wei’s politically electric work in China, Piers Secunda’s sculpturally innovative practice raises questions of art politics and power, recording some of the potent human activities of our time.  

“Capturing Chinese Army Bullet Holes was a way to trap geo-political texture in the work, like an insect in amber.”
Piers Secunda

In addition, Piers is presenting an object as a painting: an intricate 16 layer paint reproduction of a traditional Chinese ivory-carved puzzle ball, constructed from 16 independently moving spheres within spheres. Utilising an indigenous Chinese craft,  Secunda mimics the ivory medium and builds Puzzle balls three dimensionally from industrial floor paint. The puzzle ball creates a metaphor for creating a painting; a human made puzzle with and without resolution, which can easily be undone. Touching upon contemporary anxieties as a poignant reminder of lost past times, Chinese Puzzle Ball questions identity, social activity and an essence of humanity in a increasingly globalised world.

Joining Piers in the ‘Earth Realm’, Richard Mosse’s photographs employ the use of infrared film to transform the artist’s images of the war torn landscapes of the Congo into unsettling, surrealist scenes, illuminated by a spectrum of infrared light. Nicolai Howalt’s jarring images capture an ambiguity between the crumpled metal detritus of a car crash, and the suggestion of aerial geological strata.

The Underworld Floor presents Kelly Richardson’s video Leviathan, in which a phantom swamp landscape perpetuates an atmosphere of timeless limbo. Robin Friend’s powerful images of disused mines capture existent underworlds, toxically claustrophobic spaces fused with an otherworldly magical realism. Alex Hoda’s dismembered sculptures convey a repressed menace through figurative groupings of deformed, post-apocalyptic organic forms bound together and consumed by rubber.

The Afterlife Floor presents Hew Locke’s wall assemblage of uber-kitsch gold toys and fake flowers, coalesced into a deity presiding over disposable consumerist values. Situated against the backdrop of the Financial Times stock listings, Gordon Cheung’s painted landscapes oscillate between prophetic utopian and dystopian hallucinations on our actual reality. Rui Matsunaga’s paintings convey visions of animistic worlds, witnessing humanity undergoing organic mutations, pointing towards a collective human desire to return to a symbiotic relationship with nature. Similarly, Laurence Edwards’ bronze sculpture purveys a captivating vision of man’s simultaneous emergence from and absorption into the natural landscape,postulating a final material fate for our species.

Further information on Edel Assanti can be found at www.edelassanti.com

Further information about Piers Secunda and his work is available at www.pierssecunda.com