Zabludowicz Collection Invites: 2013 artists announced

The Zabludowicz Collection is delighted to announce the names fo the 2013 Invites artists:

Lucy Whitford 17 January–24 February

Lora Hristova 28 February–7 April

Pio Abad 11 April–19 May

Lucy Tomlins 23 May–30 June

Berry Patten 4 July–11 August

Heather Phillipson 26 September–3 November

Nicholas Brooks 7 November–15 December

The Zabludowicz Collection is pleased to announce the seven emerging artists who will show new work as part of the 2013 Invites programme. Launched in 2012, Invites is a unique opportunity for artists without commercial gallery representation to produce a solo show in a dedicated project space at Zabludowicz Collection, London. Artists have been selected as a result of extensive studio visits and all shows will run for six weeks.

The Zabludowicz Collection believes the time during which an artist is not represented by a commercial gallery is significant for his or her practice, as it is a period when the artist can create without market pressures. Each exhibition of the Invites series results from an open-ended invitation to exhibit at the Zabludowicz Collection and is accompanied by curatorial support and access to material resources provided by the Collection.

Zabludowicz Collection Invites continues the Collection's ethos of supporting emerging artists at key moments in their careers, beyond collecting. It aims to actively encourage development of artists' practice by acquiring, commissioning and exhibiting in each of its three locations in London, New York and Sarvisalo, Finland.

Each instalment of Zabludowicz Collection Invites will be launched on the first Thursday of its run, with a special evening viewing from 7 to 9pm. Each show will feature a downloadable interview on zabludowiczcollection.com and a public Artist Presentation, in the form of a performance, talk or other event.

The Invites series is curated by Ellen Mara De Wachter, Curator, Zabludowicz Collection, London.

Lucy Whitford (born 1980, London, UK). Whitford is a sculptor who works with natural materials including fired and unfired clay, wood and ink, as well as man-made materials such as plaster, concrete, steel or cloth, exploring their sensory characteristics, mythologies and cultural histories. Challenging the dichotomies between art and craft, her sculptures explore organic forms and patterns, physical forces such as entropy and gravity, and qualities such as light and weight. Her inspiration comes from a poetically conceived internal world, and her treatment of materials displays an acute sensitivity to the ways in which they function according to their own rules, while maintaining points of contact with the world beyond. The influence of dance and choreography in her work is visible in the dynamic ways in which she installs her works in relation to one another and to the space they occupy.

Lora Hristova (born 1987, Sliven, Bulgaria). Hristova's recent practice has been concerned with representations of women and their inherent complexities, most notably the visual culture of pornography. For a recent research project, Hristova befriended an adult film director whom she engaged in factual, theoretical and ideological discussions about the pornography industry. This resulted in frank discussions about the realities of pornography and conceptual debates surrounding feminist theory. Other works involve introducing abstraction to pornographic images by cropping, inking, blurring and erasing sexual organs using analogue and digital editing techniques. International Women's Day (8 March) will fall during the run of Hristova's exhibition, and the artist will be producing a special event to mark the occasion. Her research website is at http://oral-malkin.tumblr.com/

Pio Abad (born 1983, Manila, Philippines). Abad mines alternative or repressed historical events, and brings them together with particular aesthetic phenomena, in order to create artworks that operate across a range of registers. A work might investigate cultural events or personae, delving into their histories and drawing out associations between them and other moments, incidents or people. For example, Abad recently constructed an installation based on the figures of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, the first couple of the Philippines from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s, who were in power at the time of the artist's birth. Through a series of works in various media including some of the Marcoses' personal effects, sculpture, painting, screen-printing and text, Abad explored their personal and political mythologies and through them, alluded to aspects of national and global politics from the 1980s to today. Abad's work was included in the London Open, Whitechapel Art Gallery, 2012 and he was a finalist in the Converse/Dazed and Confused Emerging Artist Award, 2012.

Lucy Tomlins (born Chertsey, UK). Tomlins is a sculptor who works with a range of traditional materials including marble and stone, as well as contemporary materials including plasticine, resin and aluminium. By combining noble materials with synthetic ones, Tomlins creates a tension between the physical qualities and the subject of her works. A central aspect and theme of Tomlins's work is contemporary culture's relationship with food and its visual form and representation. Appropriating the highly processed convenience aesthetic of fast food restaurants, vending machines and supermarkets, much of Tomlins's work relates to consumer urges and the manipulations employed by the food industry. She will have a solo exhibition at Worcester Cathedral in 2013 (date tbc).

Berry Patten (born 1986, Essex, UK). Patten processes personal experiences and the everyday through digital language and tools, in order to produce works that chase the authenticity of the imagery she encounters. Her work aestheticizes everyday objects and tropes of popular culture, touching on memories and feelings as well as notions of aspirational living. Her still life photographs and collages evoke themes of girlishness, teenage identity and womanhood. Sampling from dance music, film and personal footage and memorabilia, her videos also display a finely tuned sensitivity to colour, pattern and texture and bring together a dreamy wistfulness with harder edged humour and sense of absurdity. Patten's work was part of Peckham Artist Moving Image festival in 2012, and will be included in a group show at Cell Project Space in 2012/13.

Heather Phillipson (born 1978, London, UK). Phillipson's work is committed to a playful confrontation with the elasticity of articulation. Her video installations and 'talking pictures' (video with live voice) splice tropes from cinema, art, music and literature with audiovisual non-sequiturs and sundry domestic items, to dynamic effect. An accomplished musician and poet, Phillipson deploys sound and language with impertinence: the videos are detours and equivocations that threaten to get out of control. Spurious narratives emerge through the plastering of vivid and degenerated images, pop and profundity, internet discourses and the drollery of internal monologue. The videos jolt between intimacy and detachment, the actual and the virtual. Housed
within carefully constructed sculptural elements, attention is drawn to physical relations between audience and screen: the contingency of body and surface. 2012 saw Phillipson's work included in
exhibitions at Flat Time House, Cubitt and Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art and CIRCA, Newcastle, and Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland. Phillipson was a LUX Associate Artist in 2011/12.

Nicholas Brooks (born 1975, London, UK). Brooks works in mediums including drawing, sculpture, video and installation. His enigmatic and highly refined moving image works often explore mysterious happenings or surroundings and grow out of the artist's interest in subjects as diverse as prehistoric tool-making techniques, science fiction and the vestiges of urban planning. They resist categorisation and have an ineffable quality, but display a strong concern for form and the ways in which humans create and use form. Brooks's work is infused with a poetic appreciation for scientific discoveries and theories and each of his projects probes a new field of enquiry. In 2012, Brooks had a solo exhibition at Carte Blanche Gallery, London and was included in screenings or group exhibitions at Centrum, Berlin; various cities in Japan as part of the Image Forum Festival 2012; the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in Moscow and at the Rotterdam Film Festival.