Celestial Talking

Christina Mitrentse investigates the esoteric qualities of myth, interpretation and cultural construction through processes of painting, handcrafted sculpture, installation and conceptual appropriation. Her practice oscillates between that of curator, collector and storyteller in an endeavor to designate the peculiarity of this relational space of aesthetics.

Ignoring traditional hierarchies of display, Mitrentse creates a freedom to suggest new narratives and poetic ensembles of personal institutions such as schools, libraries, churches, academies and museums. Using the tropes of quasi-science, telluric monuments and celestial exploration, her work offers an ocularcentric pattern of discovering worlds within worlds and meaning in allegory.

Through sustained research of cosmological phenomena, explicit for the Celestial Contrakt, she has created an emergent sculptural ‘Constellation’ which suggests a humorous, visual transmission from the banal to the monumental. Mitrentses’ use of magnitude relates to her fascination with the spatial model and scale of the megacosm depicted in the Still Life- ‘The book of Universe’. Navigating within these works, we are related to a conception in which the ‘primary’ form of the universe is defined by the significations of natural occurrences within everyday life.

Mitrentse is a Greek visual artist and art educator based in London East End since 2000. With an Onassis foundation fellowship, she holds an MA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art and Design and a PGCE from University of Greenwich. Her artworks are included in both private and public collections in Europe and the United States. Selected shows include: Solo- Building My Library,NO:IDgallery ‘09, Brench/Absorb ,Oblong gallery 09, In/Flux HTAP, London 09, Brussels Art Fair ‘09 The Apartment Gallery Athens. Impromptu,Schwartz Gallery London ’09. Public Project Commission, Greenwich Foot Tunnel 08-09 London. The End of the Earth’NDSM- Amsterdam 08.‘Emerging Artists’,Griechishe Kultustiftung Berlin 06. The Secret School Solo show in a bomb shelter, London 05. An Outing, Contemporary Art from Beltsios Collection Athens 06. She also co-curates international shows in London and Greece, most noticeably ‘Who Cares About Greek Art?’ Athens 06, and ‘The Flat Pack’ Deptford London06.

Celestial Contrakt Opening

6pm – 11pm Thursday 12 November

Featuring Audio Live Mix by Exitjesus Live Music by Douce Angoisse and living sculptural performance of Croma Collapse by Berne Roche Farrelly

Artist Profiles

Andrew Hladky

Andrew Hladky is a London based artist who graduated from Wimbledon School of Art with an MA Painting in 2003. Andrew describes his painting technique as a 3-dimensional form of Pointillism. He constructs his paintings using cocktail sticks, dabbing small dots of oil paint in layer after layer. These slowly build into stalactite formations; delicate mineral crusts up to 4cm deep. From the side this highly textured surface causes the image to distort and break-down, dissolving into disorder. Andrew paints images choked by their overabundance, all sentiment and nostalgia defeated by blank, repetitive process. Sunsets multiply across the sky and horizons pile one on top of the other, creating inescapable, alien landscapes. Worms of paint squeezed straight from the tube populate the image, mingling with the figures and environment, threatening to over-run it entirely. Paint mingles with painted figures to create a Bosch-like scene of worm-human hybrids. The worms of paint will start to spill off the painting, roving the walls, ceiling and floor, reforming occasionally into sculptural tableaux where delicate, multicoloured trees grow and miniature figures pull themselves out of the paint.

Artist Profiles

Stine Ljungdalh

Stine Ljungdalh works with a number of alter egos or personas, all drawn to the idea of capturing the hidden or invisible with the aim of creating an experimental zone. Her art practice includes writing, photography, films and props from these personas, all evidence of the existence of the imaginary zone and questioning the subjective reality of the autonomous self. ‘When working for T.  Smith I incorporate a set of rules or ‘dogma’, into the structures of my artworks often relating them to the theatrical or ideas of staging’ Ljundalh is  fascinated by duality, the world made of matter and antimatter, and the gradual disappearance of anti-matter with is proving to be a mystery to physicists. The idea of a shadow self, the sense of the double, is central to her work. She has created a place to explore these ideas of transformation and disguise. This ‘alchemistic theatre’ allows her to reinvent received ideas of knowledge and cultural value. For her, this is a kind of narrative-tree of related stories, all spinning around the same theme, and the hunt for the invisible. Ljundalh’s work is mainly based in photography, with a strong relation to theatre. The theatrical stage here can be seen as layers of knowledge and cultural values in which we as humans can act and define ourselves. Stine Ljungdalh was born in Denmark 1969. She attended Danish Design School and graduated in 2001 with an MA in photography and Graphic Communication. She subsequently became a member of the artist group ‘Brian’ in Copenhagen.

Stine Ljungdalh is an artist based in London and Copenhagen. She graduated in 2005 with a MA in Printmaking from The Royal College of Art.  Stine has exhibited in Europe and the US and am currently to start her Ph.d at Kingston University.  Her art practice includes writing, photography, films and props from these personas – all evidence of the existence of the imaginary zone and questioning the subjective reality of the autonomous self.

2003-05 Royal Collegeof Art, MA Fine Art1996-97 Falmouth College of Art, BA

(Hons) Fine Art, Printmaking

Project development documentation

November 5 2009