LAURA BYGRAVE   LUKE GOTTELIER

KES RICHARDSON   ROSE WYLIE

FOLD is pleased to present ‘Demolition Derby’, the inaugural group exhibition in Fitzrovia.

The works in the exhibition all share the common experience of being put through their paces. Over time they have been scolded, ignored, battered, slapped about and worked to breaking point in order to arrive at the finished article. Almost wasn’t good enough and adequate didn’t cut it. They have been taken to pieces and put back together in an effort to transcend the satisfactory, enduring rites of passage that have imbued them with character and resilience.

Laura Bygrave has been reworking a set of drawings over the last three years through sculpture, painting and most recently collage. The original images come from her book ‘The God of Number Zero’ which describes a parallel universe with its own mythologies, cultures and laws of physics. Each reworking goes through a process of addition and subtraction, honing forms through the experience of making in an effort to get closer to their essence.

In the past few years Luke Gottelier has returned to a group of failed paintings he made a decade earlier. In order to revitalise and push the paintings towards success he has subjected them to various physical and transformative trials. Recently works have been brutally augmented to become pinball machines, ashtrays and remote-controlled cars.

Kes Richardson works on a number of series at once, revisiting motifs with assaults of discordant imagery and attitude. Previous incarnations are obliterated and smothered, sections are sacrificed and transplanted. For this exhibition he is returning to his Gardener series, working from a painting of the same title by Van Gogh, together with works that play with chaos and chance.

Rose Wylie is showing paintings that were started in the 1990s and lay unresolved and redundant for over two decades. A diptych addresses the first Iraq war whilst a large unstretched painting is of a solitary female figure. In 2014 she returned to both works, expunging their shortfalls with courageous and assured passages of paint and collage.