18 January - 29 February 2020
Weds - Sat, 12 - 5pm
Preview: Friday 17 January
7 - 9pm WORKPLACEFirst Floor
The Old Posthouse
19 - 21 West Street,
Gateshead, UK
workplacegallery.co.ukWorkplace is excited to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by Mike Pratt.
Based upon documentation of a rug made by the Dada artist Hans Arp (1886 - 1966), these works have been silk-screen printed in collaboration with the artist’s father, a printmaker, before being painted over by Pratt. The rasterised print maintains a tenuous connection to the historical image which, combined with the imperfections of the printing process, and beneath Pratt’s painterly smears of intense, lucent colour, creates a composite of information.
Each work has been titled after a seemingly random object:
Bucket, Dog, Pond, Lamp-post, Lobster, Volvo... Collectively they operate as if a hand of cards, a word association game, or a surreal taxonomy. Pratt’s titles act in an associative way, opening up potential readings rather than closing down the work towards a specific meaning. The title functions as another layer accruing to a complex strata leading away from painting and towards sculpture. As a group, they maintain an equivalence, holding the room in a palpable, yet illogical, tension. (
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Mike Pratt (b.1987 Seaham, County Durham, UK) lives and works in Whitley Bay, UK. He graduated from Northumbria University in 2009 where he was awarded the Paul Mason Sculpture Prize. In 2014 he completed a two-year postgraduate programme at De Ateliers in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and in 2016 he won the Koninklijke Prijs voor Vrije Schilderkunst - the prestigious Royal Award for Modern Painting in Holland. Solo exhibitions include
Deep Pond, Galerie Juliette Jongma, Amsterdam;
Rubberhead/Rubbernecking B.M.W. Edinburgh,
Good Mourning Bell Workplace Gateshead,
Cumberland Sausage Extraspazio, Rome, and
HUBBA HUBBA, Satellite, Newcastle. Group Exhibitions include
Offspring de Ateliers, Amsterdam;
Riff/Rift Baltic39, Newcastle upon Tyne;
Right Eye, Left Eye V8 Plattform für neue Kunst, Karlsruhe, Germany.
For available work and prices please contact:
sales@workplacegallery.co.uk 
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