FOLD is pleased to present NIGHT SCHOOL a two-person show by Dominic Beattie and Neil Zakiewicz.
Dominic Beattie and Neil Zakiewicz’s work typifies a contemporary re-skilling of art practitioners with their shared interest in light industrial practices, such as woodworking and ceramics. Painting is included, but through using mass production methods of block printing and industrial coatings. They have a passion for making generally, regardless of whether the finished products function as sculpture or furniture, abstract painting or decoration.
Beattie makes beautiful ‘ceramics’, using off-cut cardboard and wood, which are glued and stapled together and then painted. Zakiewicz’s work uses folded, spray-painted steel and polyurethane paint on routed and embossed wood. In different ways they usurp and de-familiarise the commonplace craft of making. There is an ersatz quality throughout (Beattie titles his work Ersatz Ceramics) – a deliberate wrongness that unchains the work from tradition in order to open up the possibility for play and reinvention.
Echoing the Bauhaus school, there is repeated reference to product design and the closely related aspiration to transform the artist’s studio into a factory floor and production line for art. Beattie’s series will be presented on long tables, as though they are arranged on a conveyor-belt. Zakiewicz will show an enormous machine-sewn reproduction of a work coat alongside a twice-size workshop stool – both inspired by objects from his studio – in honour of labour and artistic endeavour.
Also included are Zakiewicz’s geometric paintings, sprayed variously onto paper, wood panels or steel, that probe the material qualities of colour with simple optical effects. The softness of the sprayed edges interrupt the hard-edged geometries and materiality of the forms.
Dominic Beattie (b. 1981) studied at Camberwell College of Art.
He won the 2015 UK/Raine painting prize at The Saatchi Gallery. He has had 3 solo exhibitions at Fold Gallery. He curated ‘Harder Edge’, parts I & II, a group exhibition of contemporary abstract art at The h Club and Saatchi Gallery, in 2018, and co-curated ‘Habitat: Artists making furniture or things that might be confused as furniture’ at JGM Gallery in 2019.
Neil Zakiewicz (b. 1972) is a graduate of Goldsmiths College (MFA) and Cardiff Institute of Art and Design. Recent exhibitions include ‘Working’, a solo exhibition in 2018, and ‘Backyard Sculpture’, a group exhibition in 2019, both at Domobaal. He is currently co- curating an exhibition at Carpenter’s Wharf Gallery, which will include work by twelve artists at a new arts foundation in Hackney.