BASE LINES

A new show in London presents seven young New York-based artists who are destabilising the boundaries between refined aesthetics and primal materiality

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he visceral, the grotesque, the unstable - what lies beneath the foundations of a respectable society? It is a question preoccupying seven New York-based artists, who are considering life’s raw undercurrents in group exhibition ‘Base Materialism’, on show at London’s Albion Jeune gallery. Named after the concept coined by 20th century French philosopher Georges Bataille, the notion looked beyond traditional definitions of materialism to a more primal way of thinking. For artists Ambera Wellmann, Cindy Ji Hye Kim, Fin Simonetti, Ivana Bašić, Rachel Rossin, Shuyi Cao and Shuo Hao, it’s a concept that can take shape in destabilised forms. Often alien or fragmented, their work embraces what society represses, in a faithful homage to Bataille’s rejection of a sanitary artifice, drawing from elements that are both repulsive and attractive.

‘I have attempted to capture the essence of the theme through strategic interventions in form and space, such as suspending work from the ceiling and anchoring to the floor,’ says Lucca Hue-Williams, founder and director of Albion Jeune. ‘This refers to a hierarchy of the corporeal; aligning the physically high location of the brain with the higher intellectual qualities of the mind, versus our base materials residing in the physically lower aspects of the body and considered to be intellectually ‘lower’ organs. In the physical space of the gallery, the nontraditional placement of works is synonymous with Bataille’s nontraditional resistance of societal norms.