High-frequency stuff, like opera, ballet or the novel. Critic Jan Verwoert calls painting the “royal road” of art, a reflection of its sustained symbolic and monetary primacy over other mediums. It’s own reification complex.įor a much longer time painting has operated its own high-end desire-economy. Labor-intensive to produce, made on narrow shuttle looms and finished with a hand-painted logo, Evisu jeans are an expensive luxury item that embodies the aspirational economy of hip-hop. Writing in 2013 on the love affair between hip-hop and denim for Complex magazine, Sowmya Krishnamurthy points to the emergence of Evisu as the denim brand of choice for rappers in the early ’00s (being shouted out in tracks by the likes of Jay Z, Young Jeezy and T.I.). And while the idea of denim paintings is burlesque, to stall there - as most interpretations did - was to fail to attribute sufficient gravity to the signifiers at play. Ball in heaven.”), the exhibition was dismissed by some as a joke. With no clarity offered, either by the exhibition’s po-faced title or the accompanying gallery text (which simply read: “The good die young. These “paintings” were hung alone in SPACE’s standard, post-industrial white-cube main gallery. The exhibition comprised eight uniform, rectangular-shaped canvases stretched with Japanese selvedge denim and featuring - once again - the logo of denim brand Evisu (here hand-painted in a range of colors in the top-left corner of each canvas). “New Paintings” (2014) was Blunt’s follow up show at SPACE. Emblems are drawn from black British, African American and inner-city culture and collided with the high-minded institutional complex of contemporary art, its audiences, discourses and expectations. Though recent exhibitions - at Cubitt, Arcadia Missa (both London) and Showroom MAMA, Rotterdam, for example - have tended to be tighter, more aphoristic, Blunt’s work retains the same basic structure from this debut. Other works included a mannequin dressed in a fake Marlboro leather sports jacket lying prone on the floor, a photo signed by rapper Asher D from early 2000s UK garage outfit So Solid Crew, and a short animation loop of an Evisu jeans–clad muscle man doing gym reps. A large, floodlit wall drawing misspelling the brand logo of a well-known Italian fashion house (“MOSCHION”) dominated the gallery. “Brixton 28s” at SPACE, London, was - in formal terms - a fairly conventional object show. Less known - our subject here - are his exhibitions.īlunt’s solo debut came in 2013. More recently, following album releases on Hippos in Tanks and Rough Trade, he’s gained critical acclaim as a solo recording artist. Rather, it’s representation itself - via reading, interpretation, assumption - that his work problematizes.īorn in Hackney, East London, Blunt first came to prominence as a musician, one half of the wavy, sample-heavy duo Hype Williams. Blunt’s not here to represent anything or anyone. In doing so they offer a complex spin on contemporary art’s current identity crush. His provocative exhibitions are designed to short sell the opinions they inevitably generate. London-based artist Dean Blunt gets this.
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