Emma Hart: Commercial Breakz: Frieze London

5 - 8 October 2017 
For Frieze London 2017, Emma Hart presents a series of new works – a plethora of ceramic satellite dishes mounted to the wall, echoing the arrangement of dishes sometimes found on the exterior of a block of flats. Each dish is individually decorated with patterns, images and symbols that start with the use of the dish to receive broadcast information and the inevitable corruption of the transmission by interference, noise and feedback. A satellite dish beams the technicolour public world into the monochrome private domestic one. The slippages between foreground and background in Hart’s dish patterns test out what is public and private, exterior and interior – producing vital signs or just too much damn noise?
 
Developing from ‘Mamma Mia!’, her recent exhibition at The Whitechapel Gallery, Hart continues to investigate pattern: visual patterns, patterns of psychological behaviour and how to manipulate then rupture these. Hart uses ceramics to create situations between the work and the viewer, often in the form of claustrophobic installations that engage the viewer physically and mentally. There are frequent verbal and visual spillages, and Hart’s use of clay is often corporeal, forming the material into approximate body parts that act as substitutes for human action and employment.
 

Emma Hart lives and works in London. In 2017 she won the Max Mara Art Prize for Women in collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery. In 2015 she was awarded a Paul Hamlyn Foundation award for Visual Art. In 2022, Hart will realise her first permanent sculpture for the public entrance of the UCL East, Pool Street West building, on Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.

 

Recent solo exhibitions include: Banger, The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2018), Mamma Mia! Whitechapel Gallery and the Collezione Maramotti, Italy (2017); Commercial Breakz, Frieze Art Fair, London (2017); Love Life with Jonathan Baldock, Peer, London, The Grundy Gallery, Blackpool and De Le Warr Pavilion, Bexhill (2016-7); Giving It All That, Folkestone Triennial (2014); Dirty Looks, Camden Arts Centre (2013). Recent group exhibitions include: Ways of Seeing, Government Art Collection, Leytonstone Library, UK (2019), The Lie of The Land, Milton Keynes Gallery, UK (2019), Further Thoughts on Earthy Materials, Kunsthaus Hamburg, DE (2018); In My Shoes, Arts Council Touring Exhibition, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK (2018); An ear, severed, listens, Chert, Berlin, DE (2017); Sticky Intimacy, Chapter, Cardiff, UK (2016); Only the Lonely, La Galerie CAC Noisy Le Sec, France (2015); Dear Luxembourg, Nosbaum Reding, Luxembourg (2015); Hey I’m Mr. Poetic, Wysing Arts Centre (2014).