Chisenhale Gallery

Duncan Campbell

13 Nov - 20 Dec 2009

© Duncan Campbell
Make it new John, 2009
installation view
Photo: Andy Keate
DUNCAN CAMPBELL

13 November – 20 December 2009
Preview Thursday 12 November, 6.30 – 8.30pm

For his first solo public exhibition in London, Chisenhale Gallery premieres a new film by Glasgow-based artist Duncan Campbell co-commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery, Film and Video Umbrella and Tramway, Glasgow. Combining archive news material with newly-filmed footage, the film looks back over the history of the failed Belfast-based car plant set up by engineer and businessman John DeLorean, with the help of £85 million in public grants from the British Government. The film considers DeLorean’s own personal rise and fall as mirrored in the example of the slickly stylish but technically flawed DMC12 sports car that was produced at the factory – an icon of the 1980s the car featured as the homemade time machine in the film Back to the Future. Campbell’s work deftly contrasts the car’s glamorous image of upward mobility with its maker’s spectacular crash.

Duncan Campbell completed the MFA at Glasgow School of Art in 1998 and BA Fine Art at the University of Ulster, 1996. He lives and works in Glasgow. Solo exhibitions include Kunstverein Munich, Ludlow38, New York and The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (all 2009); Baltic, Gateshead (2008); Lux at Lounge, London (2006) and Transmission Gallery, Glasgow (2003). His work has also been featured in Border Crossings. Current Art and Modernism in the 21st Century, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (2009); You Have Not Been Honest, Museo D'Arte Contemporanea Donna Regina, Naples (2007), Art Now Lightbox, Tate Britain, London (2006) and Manifesta 5, European Biennial of Contemporary Art, San Sebastian (2004). In 2008 Campbell was the recipient of the Baloise Art Prize and a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists.
 

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