Richie Culver & Hannah Perry : Body Shop

Though Culver and Perry’s work grapples both with and within the confines of their upbringings, equally is a desire to speak urgently to much a larger context, one that submits the deeply personal to the universal. A will to speak further afield is perhaps a consequence of their upbringings in working class households which have, in turn, speared a yearning for elsewhere, for something other.  Their practices are, in part, an acknowledgment of other artists and cognizant of how their work could play an alternative role in a history, or histories, of material consideration and subject matter, as well as presentation and delivery. Beyond such affinities is a shared arena of an intense commitment to aural concerns, often through working with sound but most notably through the deployment of tangible materials. Many of Culver’s work could recall lyrics, while his sound releases in form of albums and eps are as much part of his practice than his paintings. Perry’s work often makes use of sound, or more specifically soundwaves, and mines its ability to provide context for a set of largely visual and sculptural aspects.

 

While not instantly apparent, upon closer examination, is a describable sense that the artists’ upbringings had been spent listening to a near exact soundtrack. Their sonic pursuits, or rather the type of sound that reverberates through their work, could be seen to be akin to several artists who likewise have been influenced by the near identical period of UK club culture – Mark Leckey, Oliver Payne and Nick Relph, and Simeon Barclay included, and from across the water Tony Cokes. The desire for emancipation, the type associated with from regional upbringings, and the longing to be part of a larger community, is a fundamental aspect and key to the understanding of both artist’s work. 

 

 

 

Culver’s work equally deals with cultural memory in relation to social class. More specifically, much of his work, as with Perry’s, examines the context of his own biography while acknowledging how this otherwise limited understanding fares with a more global purview. A most obvious case is an early series of photo essays that record his family history through a set of photographs interlaced with emotive texts. Works that immediately followed thereafter continued making use of at hand material, embraced mostly for its ease of use. Yet although the modest and earnest beginnings of his practice have been expressed by the artist in the form of interviews and texts, his work belies those conditions, which in fact look and feel incredibly conscious, erudite even, regarding the potential conversations they enter with art history.  

 

Culver’s array of text-based paintings recalls painterly laziness, the type so often aligned with the school of bad painting – Kippenberger, Messe and Richter – and the cool and calm yet rapid and expressive gestures as found in the work of Christopher Wool and Micheal Krebber. His paintings record a history, pronouncing a process of their own making, and we can see several layers of perhaps abandoned and half-forgotten ideas scattered through them. Underlaying fragments are often overlayed with texts, and more recent works has seen messages placed at the centre and away from accompanying elements seen in earlier paintings.  The paintings’ texts are always a result of a process of fast paced mark making, but these associations with speed and the fleeting are offset by the actual messages they contain, which are highly concentrated in their observation, addressing large and weighty concepts of our very existence.  While Culver’s paintings might well feedback the medium’s history, their unapologetic musings on our lived reality – suggesting our attachment to screens and the incessant broadcast of images and information – speaks to a more present reality. Such sentiments are not exclusively bound to the use of painting and his performances have ushered an interdisciplinary approach, engaging audiences live, be it performing among the paintings in a gallery setting, or, as in a most recent delivery, in a fairground in Hull at the centre of the Waltzers.