From the Press Release;

'Arch 402 Gallery is delighted to present 'A Sort of Night to the Mind, A KIND OF NIGHT FOR OUR THOUGHTS', an exhibition of twenty three UK based artists engaged with painting. Curated by Moyra Derby and Bob Matthews, the exhibition will also host a series of talks and educational events led by some of the featured artists.

Two alternative translations of Honoré de Balzac's description of illusion from the 1832 short story 'The Purse' provide the title for the exhibition. First shown at the Herbert Read Gallery at the University for the Creative Arts in Canterbury, 'A Sort of Night to the Mind, A KIND OF NIGHT FOR OUR THOUGHTS' demonstrates the recurring relevance of illusion and in counterpoint, materiality. Illusion and materiality can be argued as so inevitable in the context of painting as to hardly warrant remark, but at the same time they muster such historically resonant responses and strength of feeling that they can feel like a prompt to take sides. However it is an interest in the productive play between these two qualities of a marked surface that has brought this group of works together, an acknowledgement of the imaginative potential of oppositions; "In the half light the physical tricks used by art to make things seem real disappear completely… At the hour illusion reigns supreme; perhaps it comes with the night? Is not illusion a kind of night for our thoughts, a night which we furnish with dreams?" (1)

(1) Honoré de Balzac 1832 The Purse 'a kind of night for our thoughts' as translated by Sylvia Raphael 1977 Penguin Books, 'a sort of night to the mind' as translated by Clara Bell, Classic Literature Library.

Arch 402 Gallery, Cremer Street, London E2 8HD. Gallery hours: Wed - Fri 11am - 6pm, Sat - Sun 11am - 3pm (during exhibitions).

For further information about the exhibition please contact Arch 402 Gallery: www.arch402.com (gallery@arch402.com).

Arch 402 Gallery opened in 2010 and showcases up-coming and mid-career artists from the UK and Germany. The gallery is located in a sensitively converted 2,700 square foot railway arch situated next to the new Hoxton overground station, and includes a unique outside space (to the rear) that highlights the work of prominent Urban Artists. The gallery aims to provide artists with a forum to explore the conceptual and aesthetic relationships between their work in contemporary and historical contexts. The gallery programme enables artists to collaborate in curated group exhibitions and with writers, art critics and museums. 

Royal College of Art Galleries, Kensignton Gore, London SW7 2EU. Exhibition is open: 10.00am - 6pm, admission is free. Information: www.cca.rca.ac.uk. +44 (0) 20 7590 4444.

From the Press Release;

'Shadowboxing brings together projects by four artists, Mariana Castillo Deball, Sean Dockray, Marysia Lewandowska and Wendelien van Oldenborgh, in an exhibition developed in collaboration with the graduating students of the Royal College of Art's Curating Contemporary Art MA. Using different strategies - from tinkering to direct confrontation - each of these artists considers how media and institutions that control our behaviour and ideology can be disrupted. At the heart of the project stands the question: How can one challenge forces that have become so internalised that they are indistinguishable from one's own shadow?

At a time when education is being radically restructured in the UK, Marysia Lewandowska's project reflects on moments when both radical artistic practices and student movements have opposed the more managerial turns in education throughout the history of the Royal College of Art. The artist's intervention in the gallery is informed by her long-term interest in 'the commons', raising questions of privatisation and enclosure in all aspects of knowledge production.

Questions of free and public access to culture are also at the centre of Sean Dockray's practice. For the duration of the exhibition, the College will host a temporary recording studio, where programmes will be made to be played back to a future and uncertain audience in the year 2021. His proposition for a dormant radio tower plays on the fact that radio, as a form of live broadcasting to a mass audience, will have been replaced by user-oriented digital transmission by that time.

Wendelien van Oldenborgh's moving image installations, housed within specially conceived architectural configurations, explore social conditions by focusing on relations and gestures in the public sphere. This becomes apparent not only through her subject matter, but also her methodology and process of production, which blur the distinction between performer and observer. Pertinho de Alphaville, a slide installation made in collaboration with female workers from a jeans factory in Alphaville São Paolo, is a montage of interrelating dialogues and scenes which addresses the relationships between collectivity, labour, public voice and cultural production in the face of changing economic conditions.

Often working within the framework of institutions such as libraries and archives, Mariana Castillo Deball playfully intervenes in the order of these symbolic cultural and educational structures. Producing books or devising alternative systems, Castillo Deball is interested in changing or deleting their order to create a space to divert and disrupt. For Shadowboxing the artist will present a selection of films and a commissioned intervention in the Royal College of Art library, which not only draws attention to processes of reading, but how we read the library space itself.

The ideas behind Shadowboxing will be further explored in a five-part publication and a series of events. The publication will make visible the processes of discussion, collaboration and production between artists and curators at different moments between February and June 2011. The programme of events, including artists' film and video, panel debates and lectures, will elaborate the various threads running through the project. What emerges from such an approach is less a coherent theme than a series of tactics and approaches to be deployed in the face of change'.

Kingsgate Resident Artists Curate (Part 1);

'Prophets at Home'

Edwin Aitken, Simon Burton, Geraint Evans, Tom Helyar-Cardwell, Ben Tate, Jamie Taylor, Chris Wraith

"A prophet is not without honour, except in his hometown and among his relatives and in his own household". Mark 6:4

'The painter's role has long been overshadowed by the Romantic image of the isolated genius; misunderstood and driven by obsession. In response, artists have often chosen to situate themselves outside of the mainstream, or to seek consolation in perceived under-appreciation. Being only too aware of the state they're in, an artist might look beyond their locale to find a resonance for their voice - the allure of the exotic, whether that be geographical or temporal.

Amongst much contemporary figurative painting, there is an attempt to re-engage with a perceived art history, to reconnect with a grand tradition which under modernist discourse seemed to evaporate like a fleeting phantom, only to leave an absence which seems to be more of a legacy than had been thought.

Unlike the Futurists, who felt themselves to be standing 'on the last promontory of the centuries' and who wanted to 'destroy the museums', today's painting is self-consciously concerned with it's place within an ongoing tradition; indeed, to paint at all is perhaps to own a somewhat atavistic impulse.

Such artists may not see their utterances as prophetic, but all understand the need to summon the past in creating the future, to stand outside of the city walls and call to any who will listen, and ultimately, to risk the apathy of their audience'.

Exhibition Dates: 1st August - 13th September 2008, Gallery opening times: (August) Tuesady - Sunday 11am - 6pm  (September) Tuesday - Saturday 12 -  5pm. Admission: Free.