For Tongue against teeth, Iain Dean presents an entropic approach to painting and ceramics based practice. The exhibition operates as a follow-up to Dean’s 2023 solo exhibition Boo Boo Ragout (mistake stew), an expression of self-depricating pathos and sardonic humility via twenty-four tightly packed paintings in a bright green gallery. The heat stress of the mistake stew has inevitably given way to a release of Boo Boo tensions. Tongue against teeth is a submission to this rupture where precarity, indifference, and inevatability are refashioned into opportunity.
","about":"For Tongue against teeth, Iain Dean presents an entropic approach to painting and ceramics based practice. The exhibition operates as a follow-up to Dean’s 2023 solo exhibition Boo Boo Ragout (mistake stew), an expression of self-depricating pathos and sardonic humility via twenty-four tightly packed paintings in a bright green gallery.
Exploring the cosmic implications of his mistake stew, Tongue against teeth delivers an equally high impact presentation, albeit through just a handful of artworks: an unstretched painting traversing most of the gallery wall; an unfired ceramic pot; and sculptural aggregates of cropped canvas, packing material, and fleeting studio ephemera. The heat stress of the mistake stew has inevitably given way to a release of Boo Boo tensions. Tongue against teeth is a submission to this rupture where precarity, indifference, and inevatability are refashioned into opportunity.
Iain Dean applies a distinct vocabulary of colour, shape, text and symbol to paintings, prints and sculptures. These works share a cartoon-bright palette and seemingly casual and intuitive approach to form and mark-making, offset by self-deprecating pathos and deadpan references to modernist formalism. Dean aims to create 'non-hierarchical, non-judgemental images' that ‘free-associate’ between the culturally familiar and privately meaningful, operating simultaneously as a joke and an homage.
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