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From: Schwartz Gallery Category: Art Date: 16 December 2009 Time: 12:08 PM Review: Ralph Dorey and Jonathan Lewis Private View: Wednesday 20th January 2010 Exhibition dates:21-31 January 2010 Opening times: Thursday-Sunday 12-6pm Artists’ talk: 2pm, Saturday 30th January Curated by Patrick Michalopoulos and Ismail Erbil Schwartz Gallery presents the work of Ralph Dorey and Jonathan Lewis as part of its new series of two-person shows for 2010 questioning exhibition-making practice. The programme aims to create an innovative and organic platform for dialogue between the work of contemporary artists while not being a collaboration. The process-based investigations of Dorey’s site-specific sculptural installations relate a vision and evolution of thinking seemingly at odds with Lewis’ inkjet prints of luxury designer stores. What unites their respective methodologies is a denial of linear representational devices that push and pull perceptual fields to disrupt and merge categories of objects and drawing,image and representation. Both artists take on the role of ‘explorer’ or ‘outsider’. Lewis operates on the periphery of consumerist rituals observing designer store windows and the urban structures that propagate them; it is as if the pixelated images that are subsequently generated from his photographs somehow bare a trace of his rebuttal of these rituals distorting and exposing another reality. Similarly Dorey traverses the act of making in a constant churning and upturning of received structural paradigms that denies the viewer a ‘complete’ version of reality communicating a fragmented sense of place; a set of bearings that is at once distorted and imbued with a palpable energy and direction. ‘I think its about spreading out Stopping and spreading out Carrying Delivering something Moving it to its place of use But having various protocols, – or even simply the ability to improvise – for potential situations, climates, circumstances. To stop and survey, to record. Topography. Ralph Dorey, 2009 ‘I like the way the abstract element is formed ‘naturally’ in the sense that they are generated by the computer according to averages and chance – the stuff of evolution.‘ Jonathan Lewis 2009. Ralph Dorey completed his MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art in 2008. Recent exhibitions include “Zen Arcade Precision Collider” Front Projects, London / TheBunkerGallery, London / NEXT, Chicago, Build” Blyth Gallery, Imperial College, London and “Skinflint” Lewisham Arthouse, London all in 2009. Jonathan Lewis completed his Certificate in Professional Photographic Practice, London College of Printing in 1997. Recent exhibitions include Jack presents Sala do Veado, Natural History National Museum, Lisbon, Portugal in 2009 and Pixelated, Winston Wachter Fine Art, New York, NY, Jonathan Lewis and Tim Pitman, Deutsche Bank, London both in 2008. www.schwartzgallery.co.uk Copyright 2008-2010 Schwartz Gallery