Jack Brindley. Sweat

Pippy Houldsworth Gallery is delighted to present Jack Brindley's first major exhibition in London as part of Showcase, a new series of sol projects at the gallery promoting the work of young talent. Showcase will inaugurate the gallery's exhibition programme at the beginning of each year, providing the opportunity for emerging artists to present their work on an international platform.

Incorporating sweat, recycled paper and purchased images within his work, Brindley explores the interrelation between excess and the workplace by salvaging, and subsequently repurposing, the by-products of everyday labour. In particular, Brindley is interested in how our understanding of 'work' has changed. No longer being measured in terms of its physical demands on the body, contemporary labour has evolved to encompass immaterial modes of work, such as data crunching and telecommunication. Within the gallery space, Brindley highlights the presence of these invisible 'actions' by salvaging residual, material waste from the workplace and incorporating it into his work. Brindley stages this exploration of excess alongside structures of display; steel partitions are used in an attempt to 'choreograph space,' similar to the manner in which offices are split up into distinct zones with room dividers.

Deploying dehumidifiers in a number of architectural practices across London, Brindley has harvested the water collected from the units to produce a series of monochromatic watercolours with ink artridge taken from commercial printers Here, the artist looks at the significance of sweat as a concomitant of labour, exacerbating its presence by renderingthe paintings in vibrant tones of red, blue, yellow and black. This fascination with abject fluids continues in a series of stock photographs which depict the saturated armpits of office workers. Purchased from an online database, the artist queries the relationship between the commercial and intellectual copyright of these images. Sold to be used in any number of ways, Brindley is interested in how the commercial photographer is 'working for the image' and it is their purchase that assigns them with a significance in the world. Brindley has also produced a series of pulped, paper works consisting of disused press releases from previous exhibitions at the gallery. Here, the artist shifts his focus from the office to the gallery as a site of labour. Brindley explains that 'producing paper from recycled press releases, documents and fragments from the gallery is a way of folding in the narrative of the space into the!work itself.'

Selected as one of the Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2012, British artist Jack Brindley (b. 1987) has been lauded as one of the most innovative young artists working in Britain. Graduating from the Royal College of Art (Painting) in 2013, Brindley's practice is predominantly concerned with the contingent relationship between works of art and the space in which they are displayed. Brindley's work has been shown at the ICA, London; Kettles Yard, Cambridge; Liverpool Biennial and the Courtauld Institute of Art. He also operates as part of the curatorial duo 'Open File' with Tim Dixon, having previously curated shows at the ICA, London and SpikeIsland,Bristol.

Pippy Houldsworth Gallery
6 Heddon Street
London W1B 4BT United Kingdom
Ph. +44 (0)20 77347760
gallery@houldsworth.co.uk
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