Press Release Lisson Gallery & STPI present: Collaborations Richard Deacon, Ryan Gander, Shirazeh Houshiary, Jason Martin and Jorinde Voigt 13 September – 17 October 2015 Jason Martin, Melville, 2013. Mixed media on aluminium. Diameter: 160cm Opening: 6.00-8.00pm, Saturday 12 September 2015 with Guest of Honour HE Scott Wightman, British High Commissioner to Singapore Press Preview: 4.30-5.30pm, Saturday 12 September 2015 Artist Talk with Jason Martin: 2.30-3.30pm, Sunday 13 September Collaborations is a joint exhibition between Lisson Gallery and STPI that brings together a careful selection of works in a wide range of media by accomplished artists Richard Deacon, Ryan Gander, Shirazeh Houshiary, Jason Martin and Jorinde Voigt. This showcase will consider the role of collaborations in the development of an artist’s vocabulary, and the possibilities such partnerships enable. Together with artworks that mark their evolving practice as established artists in the fields of sculpture, painting, film and others, the exhibition will also display works that Deacon and Gander produced in collaboration with STPI. In a 2014 interview with The Guardian, Deacon says of his different collaborations, “I work with a lot of materials – I collaborate with the earth and I can be as interested in weaving cloth as I am in metal. But I am also clumsy and I break things. So the relationship between my clumsiness and my interest in the qualities of materials has found a solution in partnerships or collaborations. It enables me to do the things I want to do.” Each of the artists have extended the core vocabulary of their work into new iterations through creative collaborations with specialists in a wide range of media. Collaborative innovation is at the heart of STPI's mission and most of the artists shown here have a strong relationship with STPI: Richard Deacon and Ryan Gander were recent residents while Shirazeh Houshiary will complete her residency this September, with her solo exhibition scheduled for March of next year. ABOUT THE ARTISTS RICHARD DEACON Richard Deacon was born in Bangor, Wales in 1949 and lives and works in London. He has a BA from St Martin’s School of Art (1972) and an MA in Environmental Media from the Royal College of Art (1977). Solo exhibitions include Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Winterthur, Switzerland (2015); Tate Britain, London, United Kingdom (2014); Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany (2011); Musée de la Ville de Strasbourg, France (2010); Portland Art Museum, Oregon (2008); PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2001); MACCSI, Caracas, Venezuela (1996); Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (1989) and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1988). He represented Wales at the Venice Biennale (2007), and participated in documenta 9 (1992). He won the Turner Prize in 1987. He was awarded the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres in 1996 and made a CBE in 1999. Richard Deacon’s voluptuous abstract forms have placed him at the helm of British sculpture since the 1980s and, hugely influential, his works are visible in major public commissions around the world. His voracious appetite for material has seen him move between laminated wood, stainless steel, corrugated iron, polycarbonate, marble, clay, vinyl, foam, leather and of course paper - at STPI, as if each sculpture were defined by contrast to its successor. Deacon describes himself as a ‘fabricator’, emphasising the construction behind the finished object and accordingly the logic of the fabrication is often exposed: sinuous curved forms might be bound by glue oozing between layers of wood or have screws and rivets protruding from sheets of steel, wearing their hearts on their sleeves. Such transparency highlights the reactive nature of the process: it is part of a two-way conversation between artist and material that transforms the workaday into something metaphorical. The idea of ‘fabrication’ also denotes making something up, of fiction rather than truth, and this knack for wordplay surfaces in Deacon’s titles, which might establish juxtapositions or wreak new meaning from familiar sayings or clichés, such as 'Beware of the Dog', the title of a work he produced during his time at STPI and also the name of his solo exhibition. RYAN GANDER Conceptual artist Ryan Gander was born in Chester and is currently based in London and Suffolk. He studied at Manchester Metropolitan University, the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam and the Jan van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht. He has established an international reputation with artworks that materialize in many different forms from sculpture to film, writing, graphic design, installation, performance and more. Gander was an STPI resident artist in 2014 and his inquisitive spirit led him to give new life and purpose to unusual and forgotten materials, which he used as relief printing plates. He was the second artist from the UK to work at STPI, following in the footsteps of Richard Deacon, who was also his art professor at university. Some of Gander’s recent projects and exhibitions include the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2015); 'Make Every Show Like it's Your Last, OK Centre for Contemporary Art, Linz (2015) and The National Art Trust, London (2014). SHIRAZEH HOUSHIARY Shirazeh Houshiary was born in Shiraz, Iran, where she attended university before moving to London where she currently lives and works. She studied at Chelsea School of Art, London, and emerged with the New British Sculpture movement in the early 1980s, alongside artists including Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon and Anish Kapoor. Houshiary's broad practice encompasses painting, sculpture, installation, architectural projects and film. Whether finely wrought skeins of pencil and pigment, elliptical brick towers or fleeting digital apparitions, her works attempt to visualise modes of perception, articulating a metaphysical reality that lies beyond form and surface. Houshiary returns to complete her residency at STPI in September and will have her solo exhibition in March 2016. Recent projects include the solo exhibition, “Breath”, a Collateral Event of the 55th Venice Biennale (2013); the Kiev Biennale (2012); and the 17th Biennale of Sydney (2010). JASON MARTIN Jason Martin was born in Jersey, in the Channel Islands, in 1970 and lives and works between London and Portugal. He has a BA from Goldsmiths, London (1993). Solo exhibitions include: Museum Gegenstandsfreier Kunst, Otterndorf, (forthcoming 2016); Palazzo Cavalli Franchetti, Venice (2013); Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2012); Peggy Guggenheim collection, Venice (2009), Es Baluard Museu d'Art Modern i Contemporani de Palma, Majorca (2008); Kunstverein Kreis Gŭtersloh, Germany (2007) and Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Spain (2005). He was a prizewinner in John Moores 21, Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art, UK (1999) and of the Golfo della Spezia, European Biennial of the Visual Arts, La Spezia, Italy (2000). Jason Martin effects oscillations between sculpture and painting, with the vigour of action painting but a controlled hand. He is perhaps best known for his monochromatic paintings, where layers of oil or acrylic gel are dragged across hard surfaces such as aluminium, stainless steel or Plexiglas with a fine, comb-like piece of metal or board in one movement, often repeated many times. Striations catch the light, their rhythmic textures suggestive of the ridges in a vinyl record, strands of wet hair, the grain of a feather. Martin does away with paint altogether in his wall- mounted casts of copper, bronze and nickel, whose surfaces are unctuous but frozen. In pure pigment works, vivid colour is applied to moulded panels, whose baroque contortions appear like an extreme close-up of a painter’s palette. JORINDE VOIGT Jorinde Voigt was born in Frankfurt and currently lives and works in Berlin. She achieved an Erasmus scholarship for Visual Arts Studies at the Royal College of Art, London, and was appointed Professor for Conceptual Drawing and Painting at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich, in 2014. Voigt channels external impulses and physical movements into complex drawn representations, featuring webs of interconnected thoughts, forms and words. The intensity of her hand-scribed mark- making belies the intangibility of each work. Shifting into sculptural installation, Voigt maintains her systematic structures and temporal processes, creating objects for such non-visual concepts as Grammar (Grammatik) or Collective Time (2010). Recent projects include MACRO Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome (2014); Langen Foundation, Neuss (2013); Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto (2012) and Gemeentemuseum, The Hague (2010). PUBLIC PROGRAMMES Artist talk with Jason Martin Sunday 13 September 2015 2.30 – 3.30pm, STPI Gallery Special Friday Night Docent Tour Friday 18 September 2015 7-8pm, STPI Gallery Mid-Week Screening Wednesday 23 September 2015 7pm, STPI Gallery Coffee & Conversations: Shirazeh Houshiary Saturday 26 September 2015 2.30 – 3.30pm, STPI Gallery ABOUT LISSON GALLERY Lisson Gallery is one of the most influential and longest-running international contemporary art galleries in the world. Since being founded in 1967 by Nicholas Logsdail, it has championed the careers of artists who have transformed the way art was made and presented. These include seminal artists such as Sol LeWitt and Richard Long, as well as a whole generation of significant British sculptors from Anish Kapoor and Richard Deacon to Shirazeh Houshiary. It continues to support the future of its artists, the legacy of historical figures, the evolving practice of established artists and the wide-ranging potential of emerging and new talents. ABOUT STPI STPI is an internationally renowned space in Singapore with a creative workshop focusing on innovative print and paper techniques. We offer a dynamic residency programme for leading artists from around the world, where they can experiment and push the boundaries of artistic creation with alternative methods and materials. The combination of a critically acclaimed residency programme, gallery and exceptional workshop expertise make STPI one of the most-cutting-edge destinations of contemporary art in Southeast Asia.