Ten Silhouettes

This collection of works by David Batchelor was made especially for presentation at Gloucester Road Underground station. Ten of the nineteen arched niches on the disused platform of the station housed a single work made of found steel or aluminium, centrally suspended and illuminated from behind. These dark silhouettes, of varying sizes and shapes, were surrounded by a halo of colour that filled each alcove. Exploiting the peculiarities of the arches and the space on the platform, the works combined darkness and brightness in a way that recalled the experience of travelling the Underground network or of moving about elsewhere in the city of London.

The project was an opportunity for Batchelor to continue the development of an on-going project that he had been working on over the previous decade: an examination of the characteristic colours and associated materials of the urban environment, and an attempt to make vivid three-dimensional work from these materials and effects.

Some of the structures were made from items that had been decommissioned from the Underground network and that would otherwise have gone to the scrap heap. The use of found, second-hand objects is one of a number of preoccupations within Batchelor’s artistic practice. He has made works using items such as industrial trolleys and steel shelving, discarded road signs, commercial light-boxes and polyurethane bottles. The pervasive yet indescribable nature of colour, monochrome in particular, is also a key focus for Batchelor, along with a fascination with the urban experience that firmly places the city as a central frame of reference in all of his work.

About the artist
David Batchelor (born 1955 Dundee) is a British artist based in London. His work is concerned above all things with colour, a sheer delight in the myriad brilliant hues of the urban environment and underlined by a critical concern with how we see and respond to colour in this advanced technological age.

His studio is a treasure trove piled high with an endless variety of fluorescent plastic objects – clothes pegs, fly-swatters, buckets, spades, children’s toys, empty bottles of household products – found in pound shops and markets in cities the world over. He combines these everyday items with a range of light-industrial materials: steel shelving, commercial lightboxes, neon tubing, warehouse dollies, acrylics, plastics and so on to produce extraordinary installations which exalt the ordinary and celebrate the lurid and trashy whilst being, in themselves, often mesmerisingly beautiful.

In 2013, a major solo exhibition of Batchelor’s two-dimensional work, Flatlands, was displayed at Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh and toured to Spike Island, Bristol. Batchelor’s work was included in the landmark group exhibition Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915 – 2015 at Whitechapel Gallery, London. A separate exhibition of Batchelor’s Monochrome Archive (1997-2015) was also on display at Whitechapel Gallery until May 2015.

Commissioned by Art on the Underground