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January 18, 2019 - March 17, 2019

Elephant x Anna Liber Lewis x Four Tet: Muscle Memory

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ELEPHANT X ANNA LIBER LEWIS X FOUR TET

MUSCLE MEMORY

 

Painter, Anna Liber Lewis, and musician, Kieran Hebden, AKA Four Tet, have known each other almost all their lives.  They grew up together in London, running in overlapping social circles and becoming part of the music scene as they and their group of friends came of age and where, as Anna puts it, they “got lost in music”.

For the first time, Elephant West presents a collaboration between Liber Lewis and Hebden in the form of paintings and music, created in tandem and responding to each other.  Both elements will fill the space of Elephant West, and in turn will be activated by a programme of events taking place in the space during the run of the show.  Talking about their shared creative impulses, Anna says, “We are both influenced by how we move through the world and the people and things close to us”.

This will be a multi-sensory experience, where the audience should feel able to move freely, and dance if they want to; it aims to disrupt the idea of the ‘white cube space’ exhibition, ubiquitous across the contemporary art scene since the end of the 19th century.

Liber Lewis’s paintings are expressive and full of emotional content; guttural howls that pull themselves from the very depths of the artist’s state of mind.  Often making drawings in preparation for larger paintings, Liber Lewis says that once she starts on the canvas, the painting tells her what to do; the finished work can look and feel very different from the original idea.  She frequently begins with a strong central symbol or gesture, working from it and around it, adding layers upon layers, painting out and painting over until she senses the piece is finished.  Hers is an intuitive and instinctive painting practice, informed by movement of the body and tuning in to the internal landscape. Bold symbolic images become tethering points for the emotional register of the moment.

Hebden has created three new tracks for the show, each made in response to the images Liber Lewis was sending him over a period of about 6 months.  The tracks range from ambient and twinkly, to bass-heavy and danceable, echoing the emotional journey across Liber Lewis’s work.  Both artists lost their fathers to fast and violent illnesses in the past year; a strange and tragic coincidence that ultimately took them through another shared experience together.  The resulting collaborative show is heavy with grief in parts, but also full of hope and celebrates of the joy of life, with all its emotional highs and lows.

18 Jan – 17 Mar 2019

Music will be played out over the speaker system
Tue – Sat: 12:30pm and 5:30pm | Sun: 12:30pm and 4pm

 

For press release and more information, please contact ModusBPCM: [email protected]