Group Show: Lutz Fezer, Kevin Hutcheson & Clunie Reid

Source: The List (Issue 574)
Date: 23 April 2007
Written by: Claire Mitchell

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Transmission, Glasgow, until Sat 12 May

WORK ON PAPER

A grid work of duct tape only heightens the sense of fetishisation across Clunie Reid’s ‘Something Bold, Something Insane, Something Snivelled, Something True’ that pulls you in from the street and into a flood of familiar imagery at this group show at Transmission. All three artists in the show, London-based Reid, Germany’s Lutz Fezer, and Glasgow artist Kevin Hutcheson, reappropriate a visual language pilfered from tabloid, celluloid, pulp and fashion - flickering, bite-size imagery that holds our easily-distracted modern gaze for just long enough before something prettier, uglier, funnier, or scarier comes along. Reid makes this point in a highly charged way - completely covering walls with recurring photocopied images ripped straight out of tabloid culture, the sense of such intense repetitious overload obliterating the effect of the original image.

Show us a picture often enough and its initial context will soon get lost in a choppy sea of cultural flotsam and jetsam. Fezer’s works are less intensely stated - his pencil drawings lending a twisted innocence to images lifted from the thickly slick gloss of magazines. And a series of spray-painted, scalpel-incised photographs of actress Christina Ricci become a little too stalkerish to be comfortable to look at. Hutcheson’s four collages punctuate what might be a rather Germanic sense of kitsch with an edge of vintage nostalgia (Hutcheson falls on the right side of a very fine line between the two). And his subtle and clever appropriations of the found image create dreamlike narratives that actually let you, in a way, momentarily escape the riptide of media bombardment.

More: Clunie reid, Kevin Hutcheson, Lutz Fezer, transmission, Reviews (Visual Art)

Last updated: 7 May 2007 01:00 BST