Events

A cross-media exhibition bringing together the work of seven internationally exhibited artists is set to open in School’s Gallery No. 1 and New Court Gallery on Saturday 20 February between 6-9pm.

Titled Meteor, the exhibition is the result of a challenge to the artists to create a work that reacts, rejects, references, lauds, focuses, dismisses or creates a tangent from a given notable biographical figure taken from Repton’s history.

For the exhibition Dan Coopey, Maria Georgoula, Paul Housley, Justin Jaeckle, George Henry Longly, Iori Wallace and Repton School’s artist-in-residence Ian Whitfield’s work will acknowledge how we know a person: how we construct a biography or a persona of a person; yet will never be able to fully realise any absolute true statement about that person.

The title Meteor is derived from Czech writer Karel Capek’s eponymous second of a trilogy of novels, published 1933 –1934, in which a poet, a clairvoyant and a nun ruminate on the life narrative of an unknown, unconscious and unidentified victim of a plane crash, Patient X.

Capek’s characters demonstrate a turn to perspectivism, in which truth is only evolved from a multifarious series of fictive ideas. Like the seven artists involved in the Repton exhibition, the poet, clairvoyant and nun each present faint sketches to the patient’s life, through which we must perceive some ‘sense’ of the patient’s past and present.

Curated by Assistant Editor at ArtReview magazine Oliver Basciano, the theme of identity construction nods to the location’s history, subsumed largely by the presence of a public school campus, discerning how a sense of biographical history– be it illustrious alumni, headmaster portraiture or the names on a war memorial– are central to the forming of some kind of institutional identity.

The curator has purposely eschewed approaching artists with a history of biographical working methods; the exception being Iori Wallace, who will present a short written script bringing the biographical protagonists together. The remaining six, two painters and four object-based practitioners, instead have a studious sense of material within their work.

 This muddies the water further, arguing how such formal sensibilities build a subjectivity, be it Housley or Whitfield’s painterly use of colour and its play on the fundamental senses in obscuring the subject, sculptor Coopey’s ongoing investigation into technological framing, Longly’s analysis of the fragmentation of material and the analogies this can catalyse, Georgoula’s fascination of how found objects can project a networked source history and Jaeckle’s inceptions into architecture and pop culture, both dominant forces in our the constitution of variable self.

These collective tropes are here displayed at the service of narrative; both destroying and cultivating the ever-intertwining subjectivity of the historical figure, artist, viewer, place and material; into the biography of a nuclei existence where the boundaries of fiction and fact are passé and only sense and perspective prevail.

The exhibition is open until April 2 with further information available from curator Oliver Basciano on 07736 938191.