Stanley Brouwn & Matthew Peers

Rob Tufnell presents new sculptural works by Matthew Peers alongside a Stanley Brouwn ‘Brouwn Lemonspot’ (1963). Although created in different traditions and at different times the works in the exhibition seek to fix the fleeting and ephemeral.

Brouwn’s ‘Brouwn Lemonspot’ was one of 100 sheets of pink silk-tissue paper that were marked by artist with a squeezed lemon and a signatory stamp.

Stanley Brouwn (1935 - 2017) moved from Surinam to Amsterdam in 1957 where his engagement with the Zero movement inspired a life-long ambivalence towards authorship. He subsequently removed capital letters from his name and adopted a very private position as a conceptual artist. Co-opting the bureaucracy of filing cards, rubber stamps, maps and measurements he very modestly recalibrated his immediate surroundings to make sense of the wider world. His work is held in many major museum collections and is currently the subject of concurrent retrospective exhibitions at Dia: Beacon and Chicago’s Art Institute (the latter exhibition will tour to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam).

Peers’ recent work includes a series of sand-cast aluminium sculptures. These casts are made from assemblages of recycled cardboard. Although abstract they often respond to the context in which they are shown, recalling both functional and decorative architectural details as well as modern ceramics and the natural landscape. They are accompanied by a decommissioned acid-etching bath repurposed as a font or wishing-well filled with water and a handful of apparently low-value coins (some ancient, some contemporary).

Matthew Peers (b. 1991) graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art, London in 2014 and the Royal Academy Schools in 2022. His work was included in ‘That Continuous Thing, Artists and the Ceramics Studio, 1920 - Today’ at Tate St. Ives in 2017 and was previously exhibited at the gallery in London in 2015 and in Venice in 2022.