George Eksts

Tintype is pleased to present Time Smoking a Picture, George Eksts’s third solo show at the gallery.

Using animation, photography, drawing and sculpture, Eksts explores ideas of progress, completion, and potential. The common ground shared by all his works is a possibility for infinite extension; structures that loop and circle back, that have no beginning or end, have been a constant in his practice. This process subverts what we think of as linear narration; instead of moving towards completion or resolution, he proposes that we can be drawn into boundless potential.

“Through a game of virtual and physical mirrors, Eksts destabilises notions of originality and linear time. He creates his own visual language, interchanging physical and digital components in an endless set of correlations with multiple associations.”

- Emily Butler, Mahera and Mohammad Abu Ghazaleh Curator at the Whitechapel Gallery

A project that Eksts undertook with Animate in 2015, opened up the possibilities of using digital space. Working with with a choreographer and dancer to perform, record and then animate the human body, Eksts’s choice of placing this figure within a digitally created ‘white cube’ gallery led to a new way of working. For the 2018 Whitechapel Open, Eksts invited other artists in the exhibition to position their work in a video he made entitled ‘Rehearsal’ which was then included in the show.

Eksts subsequently set up Slow Install, an online collaborative project space that has no physical or commercial aspect, showing real and propositional artworks by contemporary and classical artists.

This led to thinking about and experimenting with the way digitally created works can transmute across time and space. An example is the large wall sculpture ‘Occupation' that will occupy a whole wall in Time Smoking a Picture. It began as an animation; a circular line is given loose instructions on how to move, wriggling in an ever shrinking space. This became animated squirming shapes – which then became a print and now a large-scale sculpture which, significantly has no beginning or end.

Moving from one state to another is evident in the way Eksts combines photography and drawing. Wall-based pieces in this exhibition have often started as a photograph – of a mark on a wall, an observed shape, residue of something left behind – and then with a computer, rostrum camera and projector, Eksts collages and edits the images. Hand-drawn elements are a part of this process – thus looping back to the physicality of the human body. Another key element is coloured rods of steel and brass, bent into graceful arcs and held in place only by their own tension against the bounds of the picture frame. Often layered with hand cut paper shapes, the owner of the work can move the positioning of these components which again makes the work unfixed, potentially changeable.

George Eksts lives and works in London. Recent selected shows include: Serious String, Mansions of the Future, Lincoln, 2019 Line/Extended, University of Hertfordhsite, 2019; London Open 2018, Whitechapel Gallery, London; Casual Cursive, Sidney Cooper Gallery, Canterbury, 2016; Of The Sea, Chatham Historic Dockyard, 2016; Development Heaven, University of Hertfordshire Gallery, 2015; Cause Unknown, Tintype, London, 2014; Yaw, Pitch, Roll, Toulouse International Art Festival, France, 2013; Incredible Utility, Hayward Gallery Concrete, London 2013; Metamorphose(s) 13 Centre d'Art Contemporain Walter Benjamin, Perpignan, France 2103; Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2012, Liverpool Biennale and ICA London; Infinials Tintype, London 2012. Residencies include PLOP, London, 2019; Artist-in-Residence program at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, 2014; Digital Print Fellowship at the Royal Academy Schools, London, 2011 – 2013; the Baden-Württemberg Stipendium, Stuttgart, Germany; Studio Residency, Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris.