Leicester Contemporary
A presentation of work by Tom Faber, Lucy Gregory, Ant Hamlyn and Lucy Naylor, along with a site specific mural painting by Alexandra Macupova.
This exhibition will present works exploring playfulness and its various meaning/interpretations, from the experimentation and combination of digital and traditional art forms, industrial and and inflatable architecture reimagined and resized into miniature installations, and the inhuman and the human intertwined in a bizarre and comic realisation through kinetic sculpture.
Curated by Saziso Phiri.
About the Artists
Ant Hamlyn's works delve into our relationship and fluctuating enthusiasm towards contemporary life. Working across a pollination of handmade and digital making processes his works regularly have anthropomorphic elements that work with metaphor, technology, illusion and timing to create moments of anxiety, awe and surprise through material and visual obscurity. Alongside exhibitions in New York, Moscow, London, Melbourne and Beijing. Ant has built installations for the Zabludowicz Collection, FACT, Victoria and Albert Museum, Saatchi Gallery, Royal Academy and more recently 'B L O O M' at Daisy Green Collection on the Grand Union Canal, Paddington.
Tom Faber’s work focuses on memory, place, and transformation. He produces both videos and digitally printed images, using a blend of techniques from drawing, painting, collage and 3D animation. Faber works with a library of scans, consisting of detritus from his studio and from the ground - paint marks, soil, drawings. With these materials he develops a language of distortive mark-making and plays with the possibilities of digital gesture. Converting these sources allows him to explore the assertive, faulty generations of memory, and the resonances of virtual ‘world-building’ at a time of environmental damage.
Lucy Gregory (b. London, 1994) graduated from The Ruskin School of Art, 2016 and The Royal College of Art, Sculpture, 2018. Exploring the theatricality of flatness, she creates large-scale ‘kinetic collages’ that rely on audience participation to activate surreal mechanisms. Her sculptural environments play with a collision between bodies and machines to create the feeling you are walking into an animation – referencing the body and its flexible instability flattened on screen, and the often violent slapstick humour of cartoons. Lucy won the Ingram Prize and her work is now part of the Ingram Collection. She received the Gilbert Bayes Trust Studio Grant and the RCA Arts & Humanities Art Criticism Prize, and has been shortlisted for this year’s National Sculpture Prize to realise a large- scale outdoor sculpture. She was awarded solo exhibition at Boomer Gallery 2021 and recently exhibited at Bold Tendencies, Contemporary Sculpture Fulmer, MK Gallery and The Lightbox Gallery.
Lucy Naylor creates Architectural sculptures with industrial echoes. Working primarily with ceramics she uses Power stations, Quarry's, Abandoned places, Cement factory's and other industrial specific sites as inspiration to create both large and small scale sculpture, that invoke a joy and playfulness not often associated with these spaces.
Alexandra Macupova is a Liverpool based artist, who graduated from LJMU in 2018. As an artist her goal is to make people happy when experiencing her art. She is passionate about bringing it to the most unusual places.
That’s where her devotion for colours and large murals comes from. She likes using her art to bring euphoria, harmony and positivity into our confused lives.