YELLOW | Simon Callery & Torgny Wilcke

Fold Gallery is proud to present YELLOW a two-person show of new painting by British artist Simon Callery and Danish artist Torgny Wilcke. Both artists have made the decision to make large-scale works, that incorporate the colour yellow, as a unifying element of this exhibition. They have been placed in dialogue in the gallery space to create a total work. The underlying motivation of this collaborative discourse is to reveal the common ground in new approaches to contemporary painting emerging simultaneously in Copenhagen and London.

The two artists have shown together in a number of notable group shows in Copenhagen including; Fact & Value, Charlottenborg Udstillingsbygning, 2000, Wham – Painting and Beyond, Den Frie, 2009 and Double, Illums Boligus, 2013. This London show is timed to bring their works together at a moment when their individual practices have converged around questioning the function of painting and developing its relationship with materiality .

The works presented in this show; be they the utilitarian, coloured timber lengths of Wilcke’s wall and floor-based works or Callery’s soft, open bodied, stepped paintings, offer evidence that working with the inherent physical properties of materials is a central concern. As a result, colour is perceived as material, equal to the other materials that make a painting. Line is a by-product of stacking wood or suspending sewn canvasses at 90o to the wall. The physical form of the paintings defines the space at Fold to generate a dynamic linearity. These paintings can be sat on, walked and experienced in motion. The function of painting has been reassigned and this has a consequence for the experience of the viewer.

For Callery and Wilcke it is clear that defining a new function for painting emerges from recasting the roles of the materials. These works do challenge the traditional conventions of painting. They do not reject it as much as they invert it.