Artist: Guto Morgan, Pandora Covell, Reuben Beren James, Santiago Llanos Gutierrez, Vladimir Umanetz, Yeonju Son, Christopher Stead
Exhibition title: EUROSTARZ
Venue: Tick Tack, Antwerp, Belgium
Date: April 26 – May 4, 2024
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Tick Tack, Antwerp
TICK TACK is pleased to announce EUROSTARZ, a one-week group exhibition featuring the latest Painting Masters from London’s Royal College of Art. The show will present works by Guto Morgan,
Pandora Covell, Reuben Beren James, Santiago Llanos Gutierrez, Vladimir Umanetz, Yeonju Son and Christopher Stead.
The Royal College of Art (London, 1837) is one of the world’s most influential postgraduate institutions of art and design, providing students with unrivalled opportunities to develop multidisciplinary projects that transform the world.
EUROSTARZ highlights the shared cultural realm between the UK and Belgium, with the ‘90s rave music scene as a recent climax. In today’s political landscape, these historical ties lay the foundation for re-imagining an intercultural dialogue between new artistic voices.
Guto Morgan (b. 1991, Aberystwyth) is a Welsh artist living and working in Ystrad Meurig, Wales. He obtained his MA (RCA) in Painting from the Royal College of Art in 2023 and a First-Class Honours BA in Fine Art from the Glasgow School of Art in 2019. Morgan’s work is held in both private and public collections, including The National Library of Wales’ picture collection. Each painting is an exercise in give and take and a response to a sequence of events and resolutions: a record of experience and application, where differences in spatial registers allow for a focused engagement with paint and the properties of pigments. For Morgan, the canvas is a contemplative site for examination and openness. Here, he finds windows to reflect on placeness and the evocative landscape of mid-Wales.
Pandora Covell (b. 2000, London) is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in London. Painting is at the heart of her process, but she combines a multitude of processes thus refusing to limit herself to any single medium. Covell’s work aims to continually evolve without constraints. At the heart of her practice she reveals a vast landscape of possibilities, by gathering found objects this expansive investigation into materiality is initiated. Her visual language surfaces through a fusion of abstract elements, micro-narratives, and biomorphic forms. Covell creates organised chaos that invites viewers to navigate through a multitude of visual stimuli. Her practice could be likened to painting in space, where she explores transformation, continuously weaving an infinite web of connections between each object and mark. This results in an intricate labyrinth that challenges resolution but invites contemplation. Covell earned a Master’s in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2023 after receiving a BA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts in 2022.
Reuben Beren James (b.1995) is an english artist residing in London. A meditation on themes of liminality, concerned with the relationship between painting and technology, his current body of work is an exploration of the simulacrum. The adoption of a.i. imagery aims to blur and destabilize the already tenuous relationship between original and copy, prompting a reassessment of our understanding of authenticity in an age of ubiquitous digital reproduction. Through the use of paint on canvas, these works become a dissection of the human form through the eye of technology, the sometimes fractured and misunderstood figures manifest both the misalignment and harmony between human and machine, inviting us into a space between the analog and the digital.
Santiago Llanos Gutierrez (b.1993) is an artist born and raised in Santiago, Chile. He graduated in 2018 with a Bachelor’s Degree in Visual Arts from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He has exhibited his work in solo shows in Chile, highlighting “Perplejismos” (2022, Santiago, Chile) and “Paisajes de Autoayuda” (2021, Santiago, Chile), and in collective exhibitions internationally, highlighting “FAST” (2023, OMA Gallery, Chile), “The Walls Are See Through” (2023, Emerald Gallery, London, UK), “Works on Paper” (2023, Thames Side Studios, London, UK) and “Mera Coincidencia” (2022, Santiago, Chile). He has as well worked in residencies and collaborative art projects among which “Usted está AquÍ” (2018, Santiago, Chile) and “Llegó de Melinka” (2020, Guaitecas, Chile) stand out. In 2022, he was awarded with a grant by The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation and he moved to the United Kingdom to complete a master’s degree in painting at the Royal College of Art.
Vladimir Umanetz (b. 1986, Kostomuksha, Soviet Union) is a Polish-British artist living and working in London. Informed by Fernando Pessoa’s heteronymic attitude and influenced by the functioning of the co-defined yellowism, as a specific after-art territory, his latest project becomes pictures that are in a constant state of alteration. The author and the audience are allowed to execute any mark-making decisions on those new works whenever possible and desired, embracing the idea of the ongoing painting.
Yeonju Son (b.1996, Seoul, South Korea) is a multidisciplinary artist based in London and Seoul. She studied B.F.A Korean Painting at Ewha Womans University in South Korea, she recently achieved an M.A. degree from the Painting Programme at the Royal College of Art in the United Kingdom. She focuses on diverse materials including drawing, painting, sculpture and installation with ideas of transforming, interconnecting, time, and sensitivity. Through the experience of encounters, separations, and losses in life, the artist herself conceptually explores ontological reflections on how to live and understand her life in time and space. The works are based on the notion of – a sense of connection, a sense of circulation. The works crossed various spectrums from painting to installation and expanded her language of painting by replacing the traces of all moments left through her body with her art language.
Christopher Stead (b.1974, Halifax, UK) is a London-based artist, curator & documentarian of British counterculture. In the wake of the social & economic crises of the EU Referendum, COVID-19 & the cost of living crises, Christopher’s work celebrates the recalcitrant spirit of countercultural resistance amid the divisions of a post-Brexit Britain. Informed by ecological & economic positions, the practice attempts to turn life’s lemons into lemonade through processes of accumulation & the agency of found matter. In 2016 Christopher graduated with a First Class BA Hons in Fine Art at the City and Guilds of London Art School, where he received the Painter-Stainers Scholarship Prize and Brian Till Art History Thesis Award. In 2023 he graduated from the Painting Programme at the Royal College of Art, London with a Masters Degree.
