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This exhibition is a homecoming for artist Liaqat Rasul in the town he was born and raised in – the perfect location for his first institutional solo exhibition. This retrospective, titled “NAU, NAU, DOH, CHAAR,” (Urdu for 9924) at Tŷ Pawb Art Gallery in Wrexham moves through significant moments in the artist’s career to date, from 1999, the year Rasul made his fashion label into a limited company, through to more recent collage and fibre works, delicate, intricately crafted pieces that often transform everyday ephemera and overlooked items.

“I’m a low tech and spontaneous kind of artist, scissors, scalpel, tapes, cutting mat rulers and pens biros and pencils are ready to hand.” Rasul has said. “I adore colour and working immediately with mark making. I often use a thread and needle to combine parts of the collage, I don’t do neat and precise I enjoy being a bit messy and not perfect, I think its much more energised and beautiful to view.”

Sometimes suspended and kinetic, like mobiles, using textures, like pleats, drawing on his background as fashion designer, Rasul uses a unique mix of symbols, patterns and colours to create astonishingly detailed and evocative pieces. “NAU, NAU, DOH, CHAAR” is a testament to Liaqat’s extraordinary and wide-ranging artistic practice and offers a glimpse into the diverse influences that inspire him, from Indian textiles (the artist lived and worked in the country for 12 years) to his advocacy for mental health and wellbeing issues. And above all, the takeaway from Rasul’s works is one of fostering kindness towards one another, which is something we all need to hear at this time.

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Dates
13 July 2024 — 02 November 2024

Viewing ‘Zachary Eastwood-Bloom: Rewiring’ at Pangolin London

‘This collective body of work is akin to ‘Rewiring’, taking things apart, trying to work out where things go, what they do and then putting them back together again’, says Zachary Eastwood-Bloom. The Glasgow-based artist presents these new works in a solo exhibition at Pangolin London – where he was once sculptor in residence – until 23 December: wall sculptures in ceramic and wood made using both digital and traditional techniques, alongside drawings and etchings.

‘Rewiring’ has a personal tenor for Eastwood-Bloom, and marks a new direction in his practice. Eastwood-Bloom made the work during a four year period spanning two years before and after his father’s death; an intimate exploration of universal themes of grief and loss, they are a cathartic response to a tumultuous period in his life, a search for meaning in a chaotic and changing world.

Look out for two major new clay works: ZXY, a wall piece comprised of fifteen black ceramic vessels arranged in a sequence constitute Eastwood-Bloom’s “internal alphabet”, shapes and symbols to convey emotions; another significant ceramic wall installation in the exhibition is Dark Matter, a collection of sculptures mounted on board and coated in ultra black paint. This piece grapples with the concept of trying to understand something that is present but escapes notice. Eastwood-Bloom explains, “I am trying to quantify it in some way, to give structure and mass to something ephemeral and shapeless but impacting. Dark matter, after all, is thought to account for approximately 85% of the matter in the universe. It is dark because it is difficult to detect, but there is evidence of its presence.”

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Dates
17 July 2024 — 23 December 2024

Viewing ‘THISPERSONDOESNOTEXIST’ at Rob and Nick Carter’s studio

Rob and Nick Carter, the dynamic husband and wife artist duo who have collaborated for more than two decades, have long been interested in testing the boundaries between the analogue and the digital, using everything from camera-less photography to neon and painting to transport historical processes into the present.

It makes perfect sense, then, that the latest group exhibition at RNat5A, the duo’s studio and public viewing space on Bathurst Street, takes up the fictional portrait as a theme, realistic, believable depictions of people who do not, in fact – as the title suggests – exist. TheCarters invited 23 artists (including Helen Beard, Will Ayres, Jonathan Yeo, and Gavin Turk) to use the website THISPERSONDOESNOTEXIST as a starting point to create new works. The website employs a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), to create “remarkably authentic and convincing images of faces”, Paul Carey Kent writes in the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition.

Of course, the prompt data fed to the GAN affects the results, and proves just how varied and rich the collision of creative minds with tech can be. Cyan Dee, who is, as Carey Kent points out in his essay, herself an alter ego, asked an AI what David Bowie would look like now, if Bowie was still alive. Meanwhile Liesel Thomas searched for an AI character that she felt she could use as a subject for a portrait in her trademark aesthetic. Rob and Nick Carter went for a direct approach: their two hour long film shows a flurry of faces from the website, at a rate of fifteen per minute. It’s mind-boggling stuff.

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Dates
20 June 2024 — 10 September 2024
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