ART CITIES:London-Marvin Gaye Chetwynd

Marvin Gaye Chetwynd aka Alalia Chetwynd aka Spartacus Chetwynd is a British artist known for reworkings of iconic moments from cultural history in improvised performances. She is known for work that celebrates pop culture. Nominated for a Turner Prize in 2012, Marvin Gaye Chetwynd has referenced everything from Miyazaki to Michael Jackson to Chaucer across film, installation, painting, sculpture and most notably, moving performance art.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Sadie Coles HQ Archive

In her solo exhibition “Ze & Per”, Marvin Gaye Chetwynd presents a series of ten new paintings – wall-mounted structures which explode the distinctions between painting, performance, film and sculpture. The works mark a dramatic expansion of Chetwynd’s painting practice, substituting the miniature scale of her long-running “Bat Opera” series for a newly expansive and multifarious format. Each structure envelops themes and references from her performances, transforming their temporal sequences into giant relief compositions. Chetwynd’s style is eclectic, with a sprinkling of humour. “I don’t like limiting myself to one practice. I do painting, collage and performances”. In contrast to previous projects, where appropriated  imagery has spread across the surfaces of an entire gallery, Chetwynd’s new paintings condense and compress the cacophonous subject-matter of her larger installations within their borders. In the process, painting itself is envisaged as a kind of static and contained performance, but equally as a fluid entity – something to be reconfigured, re-animated or ‘performed’. This idea of fluidity – a freeing of the medium from its typical constraints or specifications – is embedded in the show’s title, which cites gender-neutral pronouns (Ze, Per) as symbols of inclusiveness and possibility, at once broader and more precise than traditional usages. Each work has as its basis a large-scale digital print of an historical composition, relating to a previous performance by Chetwynd – whether the blooming garden fresco of Livia’s Villa from the first-century BC (which previously formed the backdrop to the performance “Here She Comes” at the Royal Festival Hall in 2015), or Richard Dadd’s feverishly intricate vision of “The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke” (1855) a nod to her 2003 performance “Richard Dadd & the Dance of Death” at Tate Britain. Spreading across wooden panels in the style of wallpaper, these enlarged images are overlaid by sculptural objects, including a monstrous rubbery bat and a salamander, akin to the handmade props and costumes that populate Chetwynd’s performances. In several instances, she uses the concept of the diorama (literally something to be ‘seen through’) as a structuring principle, creating a layered iconography of objects and images. Chetwynd’s decision to extend painting into the realm of performance, and vice versa, has grown out of a long series of experiments – most recently her performance “The Green Room & Science Lab” in Basel (2017),  in which the backdrop to the action has become a vital component of the live performance, volatile and evolving. In some of her new paintings, objects may be removed from the surfaces of the work in the style of props – transferred from the picture plane into ‘real life’. The ‘painting’ is in this way contingent and mutable, a projection of fantasy into reality, and a springboard for improvisation.

Info: Sadie Coles HQ, 62 Kingly Street London, Duration: 22/2-7/4/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.sadiecoles.com