I’ve got a book about Dalek sitting on my desk and just a few weeks ago saw some very cool work from Delta in Paris, so I’m glad to finally announce that these two artists will be doing 2 person show at Elms Lesters later this month. Dalek’s progression from graffiti to Murakami like precession and his ability to create new worlds is rivalled in street art only by perhaps KAWS, and Delta’s work just needs to be seen in person to be appreciated. The detail is too great for any jpeg to ever explain. This show should be a real treat.
Here are all the details from Elms Lesters:
28 August – 26 September 2009
Tuesday – Saturday 12 – 6pm, Thursdays ’til 8pmThis exhibition brings together two International painters of magnitude.
James Marshall, aka DALEK, who currently lives in Carolina, and Amsterdam based Boris Tellegen, aka DELTA, are both masters of their handling of colour and texture.
Marshall, who spent a year as an assistant to Takashi Murakami, has developed and honed a technique of meticulously applying flat blocks of colour, whilst playing with shapes and exaggerated optical perspectives.
“Two changes in technique have recently allowed DALEK to ratchet the spatial complexity up a notch. In linear terms, there’s an increased overlapping between forms whilst, in colour terms, subverting the light-to-dark or conversely dark-to-light build-up of tonal depth by interjecting chop-change colour values at will across the picture plane to break up conventional recession “ Ben Jones – art historian
Conversely, Tellegen is constantly experimenting with his his complex ‘architectural’ paintings, collages and 3D sculptural wall pieces, discovering, through his use of colour and references to urban decay, how to play with perspectives through the build up of textures and shadows.
“There’s an openness in DELTA’s practice to organic breakdown which might at first seem antithetical to the precision of his work’s apparently precise graphic underpinning. Thinking back to one of his street pieces, with the moss proliferating and gradually covering the relief, helps point up in a rare natural example a key conceptual theme for DELTA throughout: the organic system and its threat to subsume the man-made.” Ben Jones – art historian
Private View: Thursday 27th August between 6 – 9pm
More at Elms Lesters