HackelBury Fine Art, London are delighted to be taking part in Masterpiece 2021. The fair will be virtual and Masterpiece online will be visible from 23-27 June 2021. Masterpiece provides a platform for galleries to showcase work that spans centuries and crosses disciplines including visual art, design,
furniture and jewellery. HackelBury Fine Art will be showing work by Garry Fabian Miller, Doug and Mike Starn, William Klein and Ian McKeever—artists who have spent their careers exploring different mediums, including painting, photography and sculpture, to create meaningful and contemplative works.
HackelBury Fine Art Gallery was founded over twenty-two years ago by Marcus Bury and Sascha Hackel and the gallery is committed to championing artists working with the visual arts who push the boundaries of their medium to create work defined by a depth of thought and breadth and consistency of approach.
The artworks on show at Masterpiece share a meditative quality in which time and place are suspended and the viewer is encouraged to look beyond what they see. The works explore light, the power of nature, the human presence and the interdependence of these two worlds.
For Doug and Mike Starn the layering of different materials used in works such ‘The Structure of Thought’ and ‘Untitled: But the Rainbow has a Beard’ reflects their fascination with the structure of human thought and the interconnectedness of the natural world in which order emerges from chaos.
In Garry Fabian Miller’s camera-less photographs ‘The Atmosphere absorbs its own light’ and ‘Darkroom’s Erasure,’ it is nature as the fabric of the earth that underpins the work. Fabian Miller’s daily immersion in the cycle of life formed by the sun rise and sun set enables him to create works that manifest an existential interest in the universals of light and darkness, day and night, land and sky and the circle and the square. These recurring themes provide an assurance as we live through uncertain times.
Ian McKeever works with painting and photography to explore landscape and the human presence as seen in ‘Waterfalls’. In his ongoing series ‘.. and the sky dreamt’ he creates false horizon lines and literally turns the sky upside down to mimic the ocean’s waves. These works suggest an alternative vision of nature’s cycles in which unpredictability and discord dominates.
William Klein’s work captures the impermanence and flux of urban life in which the human figure commands the image. His interest in abstract art led him to experiment with light and photographic exposures to create iconic fashion images. As he explained “…First, I would shoot the model. She then held the pose and we turned off all the lights in the studio. In a second exposure, lasting a few seconds, an assistant would use a flashlight to draw shapes in the air around the model’s body. The result was terrific, I thought. It brought those early abstract experiments into my fashion work.”
Artist Biographies
Garry Fabian Miller
Garry Fabian Miller (b. Bristol, 1957) is best known for his saturated coloured abstract work made in the darkroom without a camera. His practice is characterised by long exposures of between one and fifteen hours, a distinct contrast to the photographic norm of the split-second shutter release. Channelling light through coloured glass and liquid using cut paper forms, Fabian Miller creates luminous alternative realities that flow between pure abstraction and imagined landscapes.
“I am seeking a state of mind which lifts the spirit, gives strength and a moment of clarity.”
William Klein
William Klein’s (b. 1928) celebrated career encompasses street photography, fashion photography, abstract photography, filmmaking, and painting. Klein is lauded for his revolutionary approach to fashion photography, taking models out of the studio and onto the streets. His fashion works appeared in Vogue magazine for over a decade beginning in 1954 until he turned to filmmaking in the mid 1960s.
He returned to still photography in the 1980s, continuing his pioneering and inexorable approach that persisted throughout his early photography and later filmmaking career.
“Quite deliberately, I did the opposite to what was usually done. I thought that an absence of framing, chance, use of the accidental and a different relationship with the camera would make it possible to liberate the photographic image. There are some things that only a camera can do. The camera is full of possibilities as yet unexploited. But that is what photography is all about. The camera can surprise us. We must help it do so.”
Ian McKeever
Ian McKeever (b. 1946) is a photographer and painter who often juxtaposes the two mediums in his practice. While his early work as a painter grew out of a conceptual interest in landscape, his later works give prominence to more abstract forms. In focusing on elements of the human body, architectural structures, and the qualities of light, McKeever pushes the notion of photography as a literal, figurative representation of reality.
“I think paintings should block you off. You should be seduced into them, they should take you into them, but they shouldn’t give you any answers, they should push you back out again (…) I think that a good painting does that. I think a painting that tells you everything has lost it, it revealed itself and its gone”
Doug and Mike Starn
Doug and Mike Starn, American artists, identical twins, were born in 1961. They first received international attention at the 1987 Whitney Biennial. For more than twenty years the Starns were primarily known for working conceptually with photography. Since 2010 their Big Bambú structures, built from “random chaos” with thousands of bamboo poles lashed together with miles of rope, have been installed in public institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the MACRO Museum in
Rome and were shown at the 54th Venice Biennial and the Teshima Triennial. Major themes of their work include chaos, interconnection and interdependence.
“Our vision is that nothing in the world is monolithic, nothing is one thing—everything is interconnected (…) life is created through interconnected random moments (…) the invisible interconnected factors make us who we are, and culture what it is”
About HackelBury Fine Art
HackelBury Fine Art was founded over twenty-two years ago by Marcus Bury and Sascha Hackel. The gallery is committed to championing artists working with the visual arts who push the boundaries of their medium to create meaningful and contemplative work.
The London based gallery initially showcased classic photography from the 20th century including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Berenice Abbott, Willy Ronis, Malick Sidibe, Sebastiao Salgado and Edouard Boubat. The transition from traditional photography to more conceptual work was as intuitive as it was organic, beginning with artists such as Pascal Kern, Doug and Mike Starn, Garry Fabian Miller, Katja Liebmann, Ian McKeever, Stephen Inggs and Bill Armstrong. In recent years the gallery has also taken on emerging artists such as Oli Kellett, Nadezda Nikolova-Kratzer and Alys Tomlinson.
Each artist, whether emerging or established, creates work defined by a depth of thought and breadth and consistency of approach. The small group of artists with whom HackelBury work, represent a diversity of practice yet share an artistic integrity which the gallery is fully committed to supporting in the long-term.
