Eric Bainbridge: 'Potholes' NGCA, Sunderland, UK

Image: Eric Bainbridge, Untitled, 2015, Pen on lined paper, 21 x 29.7 cm (EB0635) Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery, UK Eric Bainbridge: 'Potholes' NGCA Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art Sunderland, UK Exhibition: 30 January - 2 April 2016 Preview: 29 January 2016 18:00 - 20:00 The Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art (NGCA) are pleased to announce 'Potholes', a solo exhibition of drawings by Eric Bainbridge. The show brings together a selection of Bainbridge's works on paper from 1981 to the present day. The exhibition will include preliminary sketches for potential sculptures, revealing the artist's studio processes. The drawings, on gridded and lined paper as well as office stationary, illuminate many aspects of Bainbridge's sculptural work, giving shape to his provisional ideas. Seen collectively, the drawings provide an insight into an artist tentatively working through things. Evidenced throughout Bainbridge's drawings are attempts to both engage and unsettle the sometimes macho and puritanical aspects of Modernist sculpture. By embracing the irregular, the absurd, and the cute as aesthetic strategies, the artist reinvigorates historical sculptural tropes with a wry humour. In characters such as 'Jimmy the Nail', a motif that Bainbridge has worked with since 1984, the artist conflates the formal tautology of his materials (the profile of a large nail) with a vernacular reference (the title invokes the famous Geordie singer and actor Jimmy Nail). The character pops up recursively throughout Bainbridge's drawings, and has become a form of emblem for the artist's practice. The character, like much of Bainbridge's work takes the form of a metaphorical pothole, disrupting the binaries between abstraction and anecdote, experimental formalism with a more biographical tone. Bainbridge has exhibited internationally since the early Eighties and his work has been included in many significant exhibitions across Europe, America and Asia. 'Potholes' precedes the opening of 'Baldock Pope Zahle', on the 18th March in the NGCA main gallery. Both exhibitions explore current sculptural practice in the UK by producing an intergenerational dialogue between a group of artists with shared formal and conceptual approaches. Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art City Library and Arts Centre Fawcett Street Sunderland SR1 1RE T 0044 191 561 8487 www.ngca.co.uk E ngca@sunderland.gov.uk