- Venue
- CHELSEA space
- Starts
- Wednesday, March 19, 2008
- Ends
- Saturday, April 26, 2008
- Address
- 16 John Islip Street London SW1P 4JU
- Location
- London
At the end of the 1960’s the abstract painter Noel Forster (1932–2007) embarked on a series of “open works” each approximately 1m by 15m, which could be rolled out at different lengths, held in tension, strung hammock-like across a space or laid out on a surface such as the floor. The traditional vertical display of painting, its pictorial aspects, and its receding edges or frame remove paintings from the everyday to a kind of virtual reality. Forster’s work, by doing away with this edge or gap and by jutting out and interrupting our physical space, aimed to draw attention to the material aspects of painting and challenge notions of surface. For the exhibition at CHELSEA space Director of Exhibitions, Donald Smith, invited artist Gary Woodley to co-“realize” these open works and jointly create a schema for the project. In keeping with the “open” aspect of Noel Forster’s intensions, four different scrolls will be shown, one at a time, so that there will essentially be four different shows in five weeks. The exhibition also includes a wall-based text work originally conceived for the catalogue for the exhibition 7 Aus London at the Kunsthalle Bern in 1973. The exhibition is accompanied by a publication including a selection of Forster’s writings from 1969 – 1975
