Jake Preval: Bloom & Bryan Spier: Pseudo-iterative paintings

Bloom is Jake Preval’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, premiering a large-scale video installation alongside a new suite of photo-objects which comprise ambiguous and ruptured faces and bodies held in space.

Preval's expanded sculptural practice addresses the rituals and intimate enactments of queer desire, engaging sex—and, often, the materials of sex—to operate at the intersection of humour, celebration and social critique. Bloom continues these explorations, and renews the artist's engagement with dance, working with trained dancers in what Preval describes as 'an orgiastic sublime, a Bacchanalian dance, a tender queer happening’. Masked in the faces and limbs of Preval’s friends and lovers, the dancers are scored by his dream-like composition and filmed from both front and back, so that the mechanics of both costume and movement are revealed.

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Pseudo-iterative paintings is Bryan Spier's sixth solo presentation with the gallery, and comprises a suite of new meticulously constructed paintings on paper and canvas. The exhibition continues the artist's interest in abstractionist works that question the idea of painting in a world saturated with the digital and the technological. As pure abstraction, Spier's paintings are largely self-referential and formalist in that they address the compositional elements of colour, line, shape and texture, as well as refering to other of his paintings.

Inspired by the colour theories of Johannes Itten and Joseph Albers—specifically the abstract yet demonstrative illustrations that accompany their texts—Spier uses the principles of colour mixing to add, divide and multiply structural shapes into increasingly complex compositions. Pseudo-iterative paintings sees hints of Albers' style combined with surrealist tricks of the eye. The layered paper sheets are reminiscent of books or comics at this scale yet are still boldly declarative; something akin to visual puzzles that keep the viewer engaged.