Maria Stenfors is proud to present Philip Newcombe's first solo exhibition with the gallery. COMPANY is a selection of new works that both function within the gallery space and at times cross over into the public domain.
Newcombe often uses familiar and democratic objects such as lollipops, darts, folded up paper, thread, perfume, other people's business cards and scent dispensers. By adding to or subtracting from these with subtle and well aimed interventions, the possible narratives seem ambiguous, contradictory, open ended and looped; revealing truths, half-truths, red herrings and trip-ups. Sometimes not all is what it seems to be. Although titles can describe an activity ('20 pints of milk dispersed throughout a city', for example), there is rarely any photographic documentation of the event or a date or any other superfluous conceptual padding to justify the action. There seems no need. Instead they stubbornly hover in the territory between fact and fiction.
As with previous works where Newcombe has filled a beach ball with the air from the lungs of a dying man, or carries around a folded A4 image of the most beautiful place in the world in his back pocket, COMPANY performs as an arena to suggest that the exhibited objects are activated through action and language, allowing them a subversive intimacy with the viewer. The exhibition forms a dialogue between the art objects and its potential as a trigger to exist beyond the gallery space and time frame of the exhibition, both temporarily and physically. They feed off against each other like protagonists in a play, a company, if you will.
Philip Newcombe was born in 1970 in Germany and lives and works in London. Recent selected shows include: Quiz, Ensemble Poirel, Nancy, France (forthcoming); Pollen, CAPC Musée d'art Contemporain, Bordeaux (solo); El Hotel Eléctrico, M HKA, Antwerp, Belgium; Spilt Milk, FORT, London (solo); Truly Flabby Preludes (for a dog) 1/3 : Pink noise, La Maison Populaire centre d'art contemporain, Montreuil, France; BigMinis: Fetishes of Crisis, CAPC Musée dart Contemporain, Bordeaux; Mostyn 18, Mostyn Gallery, North Wales; Legend, Domain de Chamarande, France; Sphinxx, Stuart Shave / Modern Art.
Image: Philip Newcombe 'Portable Blue Screen Anonymity', 2014, Blue plastic bag, Edition 1 of 7 billion (photo: Mike Taylor)
