The newly launched Palmer Gallery enters London with a resounding splash. Its inaugural exhibition, ‘Field of Difference’, opened on the 8th March. Like a manifesto, the exhibition boldly announces the gallery’s intentions, mapping out its own ethos. And like all the punchiest manifestos of the 20th century, it defines itself through its rupture with the mainstream bourgeois interests of the moment. In this case, Will Hainsworth and Lucas Giles, the founders of Palmer Gallery, cry down with an art market overly saturated with predictable painters and monological, over-curated shows – and more widely, an art world spearheaded by market forces rather than by artists.
The gallery space itself is housed in an old concrete tyre factory which was used to build Spitfires in World War II. Despite this utilitarian aura, the gallery is surprisingly cosy and welcoming – almost domestic, with sculptures displayed inside built-in cupboards, and a tiny side-room for immersive works.
There’s even an art-history reference library. This chimes with its aim to become a locus-point for an artistic community, a place of collaboration and the cross-fertilisation of ideas. Situated meters away from the superb Showroom Gallery, with its broad-minded programme, and a stone’s throw from the international stalwart Lisson Gallery, Hainsworth and Giles have huge scope to expand their reach.
The ethos of Palmer Gallery is experimentation and abundance. Their programme highlights cross-disciplinary practices, spanning painting, sculpture, video, performance, light and sound installation. It promises that each of its exhibitions will include works in at least three disciplines, refusing to raise any single medium above the rest. Artists will be matched through the themes or imagery of their work, rather than their process. In many cases, the curation style will be hands-off, with artists selecting their own co-participants. Giles and Hainsworth are tapping into the ‘unchecked curiosity and enthusiasm’ of emerging transdisciplinary artists, thrown into a cauldron together and left to bubble. Whilst this brave approach has the potential to invite chaos, with a good critical eye, it may indeed inject a revitalising force into a timid market.
Within ‘Field of Difference’, Palmer Gallery’s commitment to sensory abundance is clearly felt as soon as I enter the space. A gothic twisting sculpture of concrete, straw, steel, and cable-ties by Gusty Ferro is rapidly revealed and concealed by a flashing blue light, to the rhythm of an ominous post-industrial soundscape. The electric colours of Ramah Al-Husseini’s ceramic ‘Fruit Salad’ series, a collection of grotesque faces mutated into poisonous-looking fruit, juxtaposes in form and style to Albano Hernandez’ ceramic painting P23.65, a square of rounded clay brushstrokes arranged in regular order to create a gentle, minimalist blue-grey gradient. The hyper-futuristic flat surfaces of Divine Southgate-Smith’s CGI-animated desert Thicker than Water contrast on one side with the scratchy oil-paint surfaces of Norberto Spina’s quasi-Biblical paintings, and on the other with the folksy, mixed-media hanging fabric by Francisca Sosa Lopez, scribbled all over with colourful paints, pastels and felt-tip pens like a child let loose in a playground.
The founders’ disparate backgrounds –Will Hainsworth is an art adviser and Lucas Giles a Renaissance academic – perhaps accounts for the plurality visible within the curatorial approach. This manifests as a sense of hybridity within each piece. Many of the works in ‘Field of Difference’ explore shifting states of being. Ferro’s sculpture flashes in and out of reality with each pulse of lightning. Adam Boyd’s images of refracted light transmutate from photography to monotype to embroidery, capturing the sensation of a fleeting moment. Artistic processes are subverted: In Bea Bonafini’s wall-based work Alien Vibration, tinted carpet inlay appears like smooth shards of ceramic, whilst in her sculpture Swallowing Sky, marbled porcelain forms twist and strain like a broken spine. Jennifer Carvalho’s oil paintings mine the fault-line between medieval and renaissance, pastiche and copy. Her shimmering, dappled application of oil onto canvas illuminates this liminal state.
In his essay accompanying the exhibition, art critic Nick Hackworth describes ‘Field of Difference’ as ‘carnivalesque’. It is through this lens that I approach the space, and it does chime with the playful curation and the sensory extravaganza. But further, I see the carnivalesque manifest in the subversion of expectations. What is the carnival if not a time where kings become clowns and clowns become kings? Throughout the exhibition, traditional power structures are overturned. Judith and her maid slay the King Holofernes, sinners relax in the devil’s cauldron, and goblin-like faces transform into fruit. Horror, fantasy, and play intersect across the exhibition, emerging perhaps from the faux-medieval tapestries by Karolina Dworska, where tormented little figures in red boots and gloves lie stricken in a woven nightmare-scape. Ferro’s moody sound-installation leaks across the whole space and injects the viewing experience with the surreal sense of being inside a Terry Gilliam film.
This barrage of materials, colours, sounds, textures and approaches teeters on the edge of chaos. Yet the exhibition remains coherent. Sparks of connection flit between the different works, which echo each other in a texture, an oblique art historical reference, or a particular shade of orange. Different threads of ideas dangle in front of my eyes as I glance around the room, and I get the sense that to pull on one thread would bring the whole exhibition into a neat line at my feet. The viewer must ‘plot their own path’ through this complex maze of relation. They might notice, perhaps, how the play of sunlight on surfaces in the homely coloured-pencil drawings by Rowley Haynes reflects the movement and texture of light on a rainy pavement in Adam Boyd’ photogrammetric tapestry work. They might then turn to see the way that light and shadow is rendered by Divine Southgate-Smith in an invented landscape devoid of texture. In this sense, navigating this exhibition feels freeing, like a choose-your-own-adventure game.
The multiple different curatorial threads all clamour for attention within the space. Whilst this does manifest as a clash of different registers, it is more encouraging to interpret it as a menu of potential curatorial pathways, offering an exciting insight into what is to come. Whilst visitors might enter this exhibition expecting a delicate taste of what Palmer Gallery has to offer, ‘Field of Difference’ has offered them the full sensory buffet.
