Alan Uglow - Belgium

Alan Uglow
Sept 15 – Oct 22,2006

CCNOA
Center for Contemporary
Non-Objective Art
Boulevard Barthélémylaan 5
1000 Brussels, Belgium
http://www.ccnoa.org

The Center for Contemporary Non-Objective Art (CCNOA) is pleased to present an exhibition by British-born, New York-based artist Alan Uglow. A series of recent photo silk-screens and a freestanding painting continue Uglow’s practice of isolating and abstracting elements from a primary context and representing them through analogous forms.

While best known for monochromatic paintings concerned with the edge and the literal frame of the picture-support, Uglow’s body of work also includes photography and site-specific installations. Along with an emphasis on structure, materiality, and the reducing of forms to their constituent elements, his diverse artistic practice is marked by a lifelong fascination with the game of football. The spatial arrangement of the football pitch is partly the source for the rectangular, bisected fields in his Standard paintings, for example--a syntactical similarity present in his work since the late 60s.

Uglow’s recent work continues this connection through forms drawn from stadium architecture and re-presented through a rigorous process of abstraction. A photograph of a tunnel from the Müngersdorfer Stadion in Cologne (Germany), which players use to enter and leave the pitch, is turned into a site-specific photo-silkscreen. Uglow subjects this image of a functional, built structure to a myriad of painterly choices about color, flatness, and tonality, turning it into a minimal still-film.

Similarly, Uglow turns a “Goal Wall”, an object used by footballers for shooting practice into a freestanding painting, the aluminum panel is stabilized with metal supports behind the panel. Toward the top left corner and the lower right corner two circles, slightly larger than a football have been cut out, this emphasizes the built quality of the painting an aspect of Uglow’s best-known Standard paintings. In both cases, as in the bulk of Uglow’s work, the emphasis on framing and materiality highlights the object’s relationship to a context beyond its purely formal boundaries.