Event: 24th Nov, 2022 6 — 8 PM (GMT)
Exhibition dates: 25 Nov, 2022 — 14 Jan, 2023
Location: Gazelli Art House, London
About the Event
Gazelli Art House proudly presents You're Welcome and I'm Sorry by artist duo Aziz + Cucher. This exhibition of recent works on canvas and video and a selection of historically significant pieces mark the three decades of artistic collaboration between Anthony Aziz and Sammy Cucher (Aziz + Cucher). Encapsulating the duo’s cross-disciplinary practice, You’re Welcome and I’m Sorry offers familiar and never-before-seen artworks in a multidimensional display.
In the video installation, You’re Welcome and I’m Sorry (2019, originally commissioned for MASS MoCA), elements of the carnivalesque signal the theatre of our global financial system. Within six flat screens of various sizes, costumed characters in deconstructed power-suits dance and gesticulate across quasi-corporate locations, intertwined with images that evoke the spectre of white supremacy. The figures’ oration of financial formulas feeds into a multi-layered soundtrack, as visceral as the kaleidoscopic walls, rendered in colours of bank logos. The immersive quality of the work captures the “irrational forces that mould our political and economic systems”.
Expanding on these themes and motifs, a series of new, mixed media paintings (2021—22) translates the kinetic energy of the absurd, suited figures to two-dimensional works on canvas. Satirising the complexity and mystification of the financial system, the costumed figures are here rendered in compositions of mesmerising textural and visual contrasts. The artworks’ meticulous material creation continues Aziz + Cucher’s interest in using dense, pixelated surfaces as analogies for the pervasive information that floods contemporary life.
