Workplace Gallery is proud to present a two-person exhibition of British artist Eric Bainbridge and Los Angeles based artist Joel Kyack. For this exhibition Bainbridge will present a new body of paintings made from synthetic fur fabric, and Kyack will present a new body of sculpture and painting shown in London for the first time.

Through subtle interplay of colour and texture, Eric Bainbridge has created a new body of paintings made from his signature material – synthetic fur fabric. Composed of applied off-cut shapes of faux-fur these paintings pose enigmatic and duplicitous explorations: the pragmatic directness of material properties (to cut, to stretch, to wrap, to patch) and pictorial invocations of spatial depth or figuration. The paucity of gesture employed by Bainbridge invites sustained consideration. Whilst the hyper-artificiality of the fur fabric simultaneously implies luxury and an aspirational escape towards it, these new paintings, as is typical of Bainbridge’s work, move beyond their formal conditions to speak of the socio-political currents that lie, camouflaged, beneath their apparent semiotic assertions.

Los Angeles based artist Joel Kyack’s new work is comprised of talismanic combinations of body parts and utilitarian objects that conspire to create darkly transgressive sculpture.

Hinting towards an encroachment upon moral boundaries, and a malevolent undercurrent to our civilisation Kyack brings together a combination of unlikely components. Purchased from hardware stores, health care industries and Hollywood prop warehouses he creates surreal, darkly humorous objects and paintings that evince a dysfunctional and chaotic social context as their origin. Kyack maintains a Dadaist anti-bourgeois position, rejecting ‘taste’ and traditional aesthetic sensibilities. He instead finds pragmatic yet subversive

relationships between functional objects to achieve an outcome that relates, inevitably, back to the body and the abject absurdity of the individual in relation to a disturbing and complex social world, always with the potential for violence and the grotesque.

Eric Bainbridge was born in Consett, County Durham, UK in 1955. He studied at Newcastle Polytechnic and completed a Masters in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art, London in 1981. Previous exhibitions include the 1986 and 1990 Venice Biennale; Material Culture at the Hayward Gallery, London; British Art of the 80's and 90's at IMMA in Dublin; Modern British Sculpture at the Royal Academy, London. Solo exhibitions include View Points The Walker Art Centre, Minnieapolis; Eric Bainbridge ICA, Boston; Style, Space, Elegance, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Supercollage, New Art Gallery Walsall; Forward Thinking, MIMA, Middlesbrough; and Eric Bainbridge - Steel Sculptures at Camden Art Centre. His work is in numerous international collections including the Stedelijk Collection, Arts Council England Collection, The Margulies Collection, and the Tate Collection. Bainbridge lives and works in Hartlepool and Sunderland, UK

Joel Kyack was born in Born in 1972 in Abington, Pennsylvania, USA. He received his BA at Rhode Island School of Design in 1995, studied at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine in 2004, and received his MFA from the University of Southern California in 2008. Recent solo projects include Cool as a State of Mind, MAMO, Marseille, France; Superclogger, a public project produced in collaboration with LA><ART and The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, The Knife Shop at Kunsthalle - LA in Los Angeles, as well as recent performances Cowboys Don't Care at Brand New in Milan, Italy, and at the CCA Wattis Institute in San Francisco. He is represented by François Ghebaly in Los Angeles and Praz-Delavallade in Paris. He lives and works in Los Angeles, California.