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CURRENT platform: ADAM EASTON
21 JUNE - 4 JuLY 2022
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Platform
Platform is an online exhibitions programme designed to give artists a dedicated and focused space from which they can share their work. Through innovative virtual programming, Platform connects artists with a vast audience, making exhibitions as accessible as possible to the gallery's global community.
A driving force of this initiative is the social mission; aiming to provide the online space that allows artists to spark discussions on socio-cultural, political and environmental issues. As an artist led gallery, Unit London's aim is to give a voice to the causes that resonate the most with artists. In alignment with these core social principles, 10% of all proceeds from each exhibition are donated to a charity or non-profit organisation chosen by the artists.
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Current
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Adam Easton
Viewing Room OpenAdam Easton (b.1989) is an American figurative artist who creates delicate still lives that are presented in such a way as to be perceived as portraits drawn from autobiographical narratives and intimate everyday moments. Offering a contemporary rendering of Old Masters' compositions, the works for the Platform exhibition exemplify the artist’s refined brushwork and painterly approach. Drenched in vinaceous tones the paintings assume an elegant yet unnerving quality, further intensified by the depiction of glass masks, suggestive of darker themes within the works.
Chosen Charity: DESK (Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen) -
Archive
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Madeline Peckenpaugh
Viewing Room EndedMadeline Peckenpaugh (b.1991) is an American born artist whose practice focuses on striking metaphorical landscapes that engulf the viewer in unique synaesthetic experiences. Drawing inspiration from nature, Peckenpaugh uses the exterior world to delve into the subconscious, exploring the role that the environment plays on the self.
Chosen Charity: Women’s Medical Fund (WMF)
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Betty Leung
Viewing Room EndedBetty Leung is a London based visual artist. Her multidisciplinary practice extends to sculpture, installation, photography and video, allowing her to research the relationship between migration, labour and technology through various mediums. For her first Platform presentation Leung created a new body of work that is a continuation of her Interpreting Relations Series. The name of the series refers to a common experience of migrant children whose parents often depend on their translation and interpretation skills in a range of settings. This subject is of particular interest to the artist as Leung herself has a multilayered migration story - being of Chinese descent and growing up in Australia, subsequently moving to London to pursue her career as an artist.
Chosen Charity: The Algorithmic Justice League
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Raymond Lemstra
Viewing room endedRaymond Lemstra (b.1978, Groningen, The Netherlands) explores the mediums of painting and drawing with a childlike sense of wonder, balancing figuration and abstraction in perfect harmony. His imaginative fantasy characters evoke surrealistic compositions with the “illustrative nature of primitive drawings and sculptures” as he seeks to explore memories and feelings from childhood.
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Katja Farin
Viewing Room EndedKatja Farin is an LA based artist whose work is characterised by a vibrant colour palette and is thematically focused on the human figure. Farin's artistic influences range from contemporary artists such as Noah Davis and Issy Wood, to more classical influences such as Max Beckmann, Edward Munch, R.B. Kitaj, and Vuillard. For their first Platform presentation, Farin has produced a series of original screen prints of intimate and lived human experiences.
Chosen Charity: Tranzmission Prison Project (TPP)
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AMADEO MORELOS
VIEWING ROOM ENDEDFor his Platform series Mexican-born, multidisciplinary artist Amadeo Morelos chose to depict an elaborate world that captures the viewer through close-cropped perspectives that display whimsical interactions between the protagonists. In a continuation of the thematics explored in his solo exhibition at Unit London, titled Providence (2021), this series similarly features subjects in conflict with their natural surroundings. Characteristic of Morelos' practice is iconography that originates from Greek mythology, drawing inspiration from tales of Hercules, Apollo and Dionysus. This series reflects the narrative of ‘The Choice of Hercules’, suggesting parallels between a hero and everyman.
Chosen Charity: Forests for Monarchs
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MARIAH FERRARI
VIEWING ROOM ENDEDMariah Ferrari (b.1996, USA) is a contemporary visual artist whose practice explores themes surrounding fabricated sentience, the capacity to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively. Ferrari depics the sensation of touch through disembodied hands, allowing the viewer to focus on this singular sense.
Hyperreal colour and lighting bring the figures to life, enhancing the plausibility of the environment whilst bringing its utter absurdness to the viewer's attention. Water saturates both the figure and the ground, highlighting the still surface of water before submergence, providing opportune moments for painting. The figure interacts through playful touch and slippery movements, contained in a dreamlike state. This challenges our perception of sentience both in actuality and simulation, calling into question the sensory event of being alive. Mariah lives and works in Milwaukee, USA.Chosen Charity: Milwaukee Women's Center (Community Advocates)
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Amy Beager
Viewing Room EndedAmy Beager (b. 1988) lives and works from her studio in Chelmsford, UK. Amy’s painterly language has re-imagined figurative painting with her bold colour juxtapositions; figures rendered in a simultaneously classical yet modern style; and compositions which are exquisitely romantic and poetic. Parallel to the joyous vivid colour palette and swathes of rich paint and brushwork, often the figures appear restless, fervent, and in a complex tension of ecstasy and anguish. Reminiscent of the dramatic poses of the divine saints from the Renaissance period, these figures hover between the classical and the contemporary. Amy's paintings both celebrate and explore the emotional intensity and intimacy of love. Predominantly featuring the female figure, Beager casts these female protagonists as modern-day deities, transcending their stature and presence; suspended, dream-like, between the imagined and reality.
Chosen Charity: Open Cages, UK
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Emma Odumade
Viewing Room EndedEmma Odumade (b.2000) is a multi-faceted Nigerian artist whose work centers around hyper realistic drawings which interact with notions of identity and explore the social constructs of beauty and power. Born and raised in Lagos, his art journey started at a very young age - drawing comics and cartoons and pasting collages on paper. In his latest body of work for Platform, Odumade explores themes of birth, life, identity, cultural practices and a philosophy of 'togetherness' through mixed media.
Chosen Charity: Treasure of Love Missionaries of Charity
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Platform X Institut
Shir Pakman: EndedShir Pakman’s artwork combines 3D digital mediums with traditional genres and styles. Pakman draws on Classical figurative art (renaissance, Dutch, German and British) to create works that feel situated in the contemporary while drawing on the past. Bridging the expansive gap between traditional art genres and contemporary digital practices, Pakman’s artworks are idiosyncratic renderings of peaceful and sensitive figures caught between worlds.
Institut and Platform are delighted to collaborate to bring together a special set of five of Pakman’s works, offered exclusively for sale across our two platforms.
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Stefan Zsaitsits
EndedAustrian artist Stefan Zsaitsits currently lives and works near Vienna. In his latest body of work for Platform, Zsaitsits continues to explore the most important medium in his process: drawing. The medium of drawing allows Zsaitsits to follow traces of the unconscious, impressions of daily life or almost forgotten memories, noting that "drawing is the medium that comes closest to human thought". The solitary figures within his work occupy surreal and dreamlike worlds, reflecting the interior workings of the mind. Rationality and irrationality, order and chaos, real and surreal exist in tandem in the artist's mind and on the page. Ultimately, the works are depictions of the absurdity and irrationality of life.
Chosen Charity: Médecins Sans Frontières, UK
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Larissa De Jesús Negrón
EndedLarissa De Jesús Negrón is a multidisciplinary artist who yearns for introspection and finds self evaluation through her intimate and often otherworldly spaces and portraits. Her stylistically varied and neo-surreal imagery is linked to the artist’s curiosity of the subconscious and neuroticism. Larissa has a profound interest in healing and addressing her childhood and adult trauma through her work. For all of us, the expression of emotion is essential to overcoming trauma. These mundane moments of despair, fear and excitement are brought to the eyes of the viewer as a cathartic way to connect.
Chosen Charity: Safe Passage Project
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Alfie Rouy
EndedAlfie Rouy takes on forms from the natural world in order to materialise the flow of versatile, fluid-like energies that exist within our shared field of existence. His free-flowing forms express elements of polarity and unity through figurative imagery - a vision of dreamlike divinity and a surreal reality accompanied by warm, hazy colours, extending an over-exaggerated notion of the works’ original intent of transposing peace, love, wisdom, and unity upon the viewer. In this series of works for Platform, Rouy has created a narrative throughout his works that aim to document just a few seconds of time. Within these moments each character, unbeknownst to each other, form and align into some sort of synchronisation with one another.
Chosen Charity: Young Minds, UK
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Stacey Gillian Abe
EndedStacey Gillian Abe's latest body of work explores ideas of being and becoming, living in one’s truest self through self-discovery and an understanding of one's own identity. Some of the most vital issues facing the Black population includes a sense of belonging, to be seen and heard and to be understood. Of Kings, Queens and Prostitutes explores these issues to highlight a state of being and becoming; to live in one’s truest form as a journey towards self-discovery.
Chosen Charity: Refugee Council, London -
Group Exhibition: Imaging Blackness
EndedThis exhibition is an exploration of how Black contemporary photographers are exploring Blackness, and its many facets through photography. It is a bold coming together of global talent that reclaims the agency of the Black figure. There was a time when photography documented our oppression; black bodies captured through the shutter clicks of white hands. With Imaging Blackness, through the work of these photographers, I look to present personal aspects of Blackness to prove that we are not a monolith. I hope to offer space for connection and new energies, to dance and dream. - Aindrea Emelife, Curator
Chosen Charity: Black Minds Matter
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Javier Ruiz Pérez
EndedJavier Ruiz Pérez's artistic practice is focused on depicting the nuances of the pure and raw human relationships by capturing seemingly trivial, everyday stories. Manipulating the dichotomy between dreams and reality, Pérez creates a personalised space for his characters by juxtaposing mundane scenes of modern life with blissful landscapes.
Chosen Charity: Spanish Association For Prader-Willi Syndrome (AESPW)
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Stephen Wong
EndedInspired by natural scenery and wordly vistas, Stephen Wong's latest body of work focuses on his continuing exploration of landscape painting. Unable to travel as usual and in a response to the current times, Wong's work explores the idea of virtual travel in Google Earth, prompting the viewer to consider the relationship between nature and virtual reality.
Chosen Charity: Ocean Recovery Alliance
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Anna Liber Lewis
EndedAnna Liber Lewis's latest body of work titled 'The Space Between Us' plays with the concept of dublicity and its effect on the senses. The harmoniously balanced compositions sit on a fine line; where the balance can be tipped at any moment to create a clash or discord. In these works the word NO, a recent subject matter, is reworked using the language of colour and hard-edge abstraction.
Chosen Charity: Cancer Research UK
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Ricardo Partida
EndedIn his new body of work, titled ‘Bridgeport to Heaven’, Ricardo Partida creates sensual avatars that redefine representations of gender and sexuallity in the Western Art Canon. The title ‘Bridgeport To Heaven’ refers to Partida’s relationship to his neighbourhood in Bridgeport, Chicago, Illinois and the space he occupies in it. The main focus of Partida’s work is the research into human connection and the delicacy of the human state.
Chosen Charity: Arts of Life
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Kristof Santy
EndedInspired by his immediate environment, Kristof Santy creates colourful images that feel familiar. For the Platform series, Santy chose a coherent selection of four large-scale still lifes, focusing on the interplay between colour, form and shape. These pieces are immersive in the way they capture the viewers with their dynamic compositions.
Chosen Charity: De Trompet a project by vzw Onze Kinderen
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Daisy Collingridge
EndedDaisy Collingridge's multi-disciplinary practice is focused on the exploration of the human form through the interplay between sculpture and performance art, which takes form in what she calls the ‘Squishies’. These creations are either purely sculptural or wearable flesh suits, which once worn by the artist become animated and full of life.
Chosen Charity: Great Ormond Street Hospital
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Ayobola Kekere-Ekun
EndedAyobola Kekere-Ekun’s Platform exhibition presents a series of paintings that examine how unresolved trauma can affect memory. These works aim to reconstruct the artist’s obscured childhood, drawing from old family photographs, conversations with family members and pop cultural references. In grappling with the highly personal, Kekere-Ekun attempts to unravel the connections between the self and identity and how these interact with individual and collective memory.
Chosen Charity: Stand to End Rape
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Gill Button
EndedGill Button is known for her captivating translation of found imagery; creating gestural, intimate portraits that are deeply personal and intuitive. Capturing moments of wonder, melancholy, strength or vulnerability, Button’s practice makes us question how we connect to each other, but ultimately to ourselves. Her larger canvases, often cinematic in nature, depict moments of contemplation; evocative of distant dreams, fears or memories.
Chosen Charity: Mind
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Skye Volmar / Gabrielle Banks
EndedArtists Gabrielle Banks and Skye Volmar studied painting together as undergrads at the Rhode Island School of Design; they were two of four black women to graduate from the department in 2019. They currently live and work in their respective hometowns: Providence, Rhode Island for Banks, Los Angeles for Volmar. This bi-coastal body of work was created over the past year, recommuning the connection the artists had created in order to survive a predominantly white institution of higher education. Given Banks and Volmar’s shared interests, their work inevitably overlaps, particularly around ideas of socialization and study. In this two-person Platform presentation, Banks and Volmar present a series of works known collectively as Split Ends.
Chosen Charity: The Loveland Foundation Therapy Fund
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Edozie Anedu
EndedEdozie Anedu’s latest body of work (Allegory) is an etymology of symbols. Referencing popular culture and religious iconography, he investigates how meaning is made and held in the collective unconscious. “It’s like learning a language. First you learn the alphabet, then you learn to spell, then you learn to put sentences together.” Anedu’s earliest exposure to art was through the Catholic church. He was moved by the indulgent artistry of Biblical tableaux, emotive iconography and opulent mass. He later became aware of the intimate relationship between the advancement of doctrine and the proliferation of (religious) icons and questioned how much free agency is given to them.
Chosen Charity: The Street Project Foundation, Lagos
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Heesoo Kim
EndedHeesoo Kim was born in Seoul, South Korea in 1984. His work is primarily a reflection on what it is to be human, what it feels like to exist day to day as an individual within a larger social system. In this body of work Kim isolates the only truly universal human experience (that of ageing) and spotlights this phenomena as a potential source of collective catharsis.
Chosen Charity: Conservation International
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Carlos Rodriguez
Ended"My paintings and ceramic figures have a guiding thread: all these big-nosed, beardy men, who explore their place in the world, their emotions, relations, impulses, and sexual desires with their tummies. Slowly but surely, I’ve been building a universe where these characters recreate personal experiences. Their passions are narrated through anatomic and scientific curiosities. The process of putting together the pieces of a forgotten mythology has helped me address my artistic concerns."
Chosen Charity: Casa Frida
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Giovanni Vetere
EndedGiovanni Vetere’s Platform exhibition presents six new ceramic sculptures and four limited-edition photographs, produced in the artist’s studio in Rome. Working with performance and sculpture, Vetere’s artistic practice is rooted in the idea of ‘embodiment’ and on expanding the notion of ‘body’ and our sense of ‘human’ on this planet.
Chosen Charity: Mare Vivo
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Alex Seton
EndedAlex Seton’s Platform exhibition is comprised of four real, physical sculptures, and four others that exist in Augmented Reality. Together they form the artist’s ‘Personal Monument’ series: a body of work that continues Seton’s explorations of classical statuary and public monuments, but does so in a way that shifts the established emphasis towards something more personal and private.
Chosen Charity: The Asylum Seeker Resource Centre
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Youada
EndedYouada’s practice is rooted in the materials and aesthetics of street art. As a teenager he would move through the streets of Huangzhou, honing his spray-painting skills and imbibing a very particular visual style that’s unique to Chinese street art culture.
Chosen Charity: Street Art for Mankind
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Deborah Brown
EndedDeborah Brown’s recent paintings were made during the Covid-19 pandemic in New York, where the artist lives and works. Reflecting a time of social isolation, the paintings depict individuals in domestic settings with their pets, as well as still life objects drawn from the artist’s collections. The common thread is an examination of what it means to be human in a time of loss and resilience.
Chosen Charity: Still Waters in a Storm
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David Henry Nobody Jr
EndedDavid Henry Nobody Jr is the name given to David’s online performative alter-ego. He is known for transforming himself into bizarre characters using masks and wearable sculptures comprised of food and consumerist detritus. This practice is referred to as “Resemblagè,” a term coined by David to describe the unique conceptualisations which humorously and disturbingly explore the dark side of American pop-culture.
Chosen Charity: The Campaign Against Hunger
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Nicolas Holiber
EndedFor Brooklyn-based artist Nicolas Holiber, lockdown, during the early days of coronavirus, was a time for deep self-reflection, triggering a shift in the content of his work. In a response to the times, Holiber began to focus on themes of conflict and tragedy with an aim to explore human behaviour. His work is not necessarily a comment on these issues but is more of an exposé. Holiber’s paintings are able to capture all of the stresses, anxieties, and uncertainties we may be feeling at this very moment.
Chosen Charity: Artistic Noise
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Elsa Rouy
EndedElsa Rouy takes to the Platform with a new series of work that continues her exploration of bodily fluids, a theme that has gripped her for some time.
Chosen Charities: Basis Sex Work Project, Leeds, UK & The Trussell Trust
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Ziping Wang
EndedZiping Wang’s work deals with the issue of invasive tech, contributing to a necessary debate that has established itself at the forefront of our societies across the globe.
Chosen Charity: The Center For Humane Technology.VIEW NOW -
Joshua Hagler
EndedWhen Joshua Hagler was very young his brother passed away. At the start of 2020, months before the arrival of his baby daughter, Hagler’s work began to reflect his thoughts on the role art can play as a mediator between the past, present and future.
Chosen Charity: The Brady Campaign - United Against Gun Violence
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