Charlie Smith London is a curatorial dealership whose intention is to promote predominantly London based progressive artists. Director Zavier Ellis talks about the gallery’s program and the work of two young artists the gallery represents at Preview Berlin: Tessa Farmer and Gavin Nolan. Interview: Sabine Trieloff. Preview Berlin – The Emerging Art Fair, September 29, 2006.
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00:00 I'm here with Xavier Ellis from Charlie Smith in London.
00:04 Charlie Smith London, yes.
00:05 Charlie Smith London, nice to meet you.
00:06 Nice to meet you.
00:07 How are you?
00:08 Good, thank you.
00:09 Yeah, enjoying my time in Berlin.
00:11 And you're the first time at Art Fair Berlin?
00:14 First time at Art Fair, first time at Preview, yes.
00:17 Third time in Berlin itself, so.
00:21 And the painters, the artists are international?
00:26 They're mostly London based, I mean we focus on mostly British artists and those that tend to be based in London.
00:33 Again, we look outside of that, we don't have to commit ourselves just to London based artists, as we don't commit ourselves just to painters, but primarily London based painters, yes.
00:46 And the age of the artists?
00:48 Age between, for example, with this show we have here is between 22 up to about 31 years old generally.
00:57 And we have one artist that's 40, so generally younger artists.
01:01 We look at emerging artists, particularly those coming out of college, I mean I would say emerging to mid-career artists.
01:09 So despite these being fairly young, we could say, being mostly in their 20s, they do have a lot of shows behind them, they have good bibliographies and they're in some quite prominent collections.
01:21 And when you say London based, how do you choose the artists?
01:26 They are coming to the gallery?
01:28 It's a mixture, I mean I go to all the graduate shows, so that's really where I meet a lot of artists.
01:35 But then again, like anywhere, it's about going to shows, it's about networking, it's about going to artist studios, meeting artists, friends of other artists, etc.
01:45 So it really varies, but I'm very keen on looking at the young recent graduates, that's where I meet a lot of artists.
01:55 And you said before it's the first time that you take part here at the Art Fair Preview.
02:01 That's right, yeah.
02:02 And you mentioned the next steps like Scope, and for the next year, what are your plans?
02:08 Well I think we'd look at doing something around the Armoury.
02:13 When we get to Fries, it's going to be Scope or Zoo, we have London Art Fair in January, possibly Basel in the summer as well.
02:23 And I'd also like to look around at FIAC and show off.
02:28 So we have today the second day of the Art Fair, we had already the opening.
02:33 What was special or was something special at the opening here in Berlin?
02:38 Well it was certainly busy and I'm happy with the people that we met.
02:42 We met a lot of collectors, we met a lot of curators and a lot of gallerists.
02:46 So I mean it's very good when we come over to Germany, in particular to Berlin, to meet European collectors and gallerists.
02:55 It's very good exposure for that.
02:57 So the community is more or less European collectors you would say?
03:01 I think so, I would say mostly German, fundamentally European with some American and some British as well in fact.
03:10 And we had a very good response to the artists generally, so it's always pleasing when we have a response to a selection of artists rather than it being focused on one or two.
03:20 So we're very happy with that.
03:22 This is Tessa Farmer, the piece is called Snake Ship.
03:27 Tessa is in her mid-twenties and graduated from John Ruskin, Oxford University.
03:33 She took her MA there as well as her BA and she's now based in London.
03:37 This is quite characteristic of her work, what we have here are handmade skeletal characters.
03:45 These are made from plant roots and tree roots and then of course she adds insect wings and other elements to them.
03:53 Then the insects themselves, they're either found or collected.
03:57 In fact one of them is around 50 years old.
04:00 The central piece is a snake skeleton and then attached to that is a rabbit skull.
04:07 So what we have here is a battle, it's basically an invented species.
04:13 So Tessa sees these as malevolent fairy type characters.
04:20 They come from the earth and battle with insects in the natural world.
04:25 So we have them attacking, we have them collecting, we have insects as prisoners within cages in the snake skeleton there.
04:34 Generally she always makes them in this, what I call a mobile format.
04:42 More recently she's been working with floor based elements but this is to be developed within the work.
04:49 She's in prominent collections, Charles Saatchi has two of these pieces as well as quite a few private collections in the UK and Europe as well.
05:00 So this is Tessa.
05:04 This artist is Gavin Nolan, he's again based in London, he studied at Royal Academy and he's in his late 20s.
05:16 This is a self portrait, Gavin specialises in portraiture and predominantly self portraiture.
05:22 He really is interested in the line and the relationship between beauty and the grotesque.
05:31 So we have this kind of deathly palette but also it refers perhaps to glamour and advertising.
05:41 He looks at portraiture throughout art history and incorporates a lot of it as influences within his work.
05:49 There's an element within his painting of role play, so he'll dress himself up and characterise himself.
05:58 He's really very interested in the horror, in the grotesque sense of humanity I guess.