Duncan Marquiss
12 Jan - 16 Feb 2008
DUNCAN MARQUISS
"Nachdrag"
Opening: Friday, January 11th, 6pm – 8pm
Exhibition period: January 12th – February 16th 2008
Galerie Peter Kilchmann is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of Scottish artist Duncan Marquiss (*1979 in Aberdeenshire, lives and works in London). He will show an installation with the film The Clay Wall (2007) as well as a selection of his latest drawings and collages.
The film The Clay Wall begins with a static exposure of a gloomy lake, the houses of a little village and a remote frame house located at a clearing. When the camera is directed towards a young woman sitting in the auditorium of a theatre, the atmosphere slowly builds up. The pro-tagonist, a red-haired young man, is being introduced to us right from the start: In the first scene, he gathers herbs on a meadow. With a searching glance, he ensures that nobody is watching him and with a quick movement, he puts the plants in his bag. Back in his bed-sit, the young man mixes a brown unction and rubs it all over his naked body, his arms and his face. The sound of his putting on and smearing the liquid is ostensible. After a close-up of his face, hallucinogen images emerge in sequences of milliseconds: a dog, shady figures in the rain, smoke, a forest card road. A scene in his bedsit with a young woman follows and an erotic flirt-ing soon turns into a sanguinary orgy. The film ends with its first image: A dark lake that reflects the surrounding trees.
With The Clay Wall the artist manifests his general interest in the banality of magic and para-psychological phenomena, and the legends of Nordic mythology. This is testified to by his us-age of atmospheric density and the gloominess of the landscape images. The plot of the film can be taken as a modern form of juvenile escapism from an ordinary world. His immediate experience of becoming conscious is expressed with the hallucinogen images in the last scene and his encounter with the woman who acts like a femme fatale. In the film, puberty functions as a metaphor for the uncontrolled subject. Although the film contains a narrative structure, the observer is constantly being rattled, as it is difficult to classify the film within a certain genre.
In his figurative drawings and collages, Duncan Marquiss combines movable pieces of scener-ies from horror films, film classics and print media. His protagonists are drawn in a realistic style with pencil or crayon. They often seem disconcertingly displaced or suddenly disappear like ghosts. Others are portrayed as introverted figures or eccentrically move within the space. With masterly skill, Marquiss plays with indefiniteness and gaps. The artist often resorts to the motif of the werewolf or other centaurs. The transformation of an animal into a human being symbolically embodies the return to animality and to our origins. With the help of figurative stencils and stereotypes, Marquiss creates a parallel universe that only exists on paper.
Duncan Marquiss finished his career in 2005 with a Master of Fine Arts at Glasgow School of Art. He has participated at various group exhibitions. In 2005, Galerie Peter Kilchmann pre-sented his works in the exhibition Figure-Five Positions. This year, Marquiss had his first institu-tional solo exhibition at The Changing Room in Sterling (Scotland).
"Nachdrag"
Opening: Friday, January 11th, 6pm – 8pm
Exhibition period: January 12th – February 16th 2008
Galerie Peter Kilchmann is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of Scottish artist Duncan Marquiss (*1979 in Aberdeenshire, lives and works in London). He will show an installation with the film The Clay Wall (2007) as well as a selection of his latest drawings and collages.
The film The Clay Wall begins with a static exposure of a gloomy lake, the houses of a little village and a remote frame house located at a clearing. When the camera is directed towards a young woman sitting in the auditorium of a theatre, the atmosphere slowly builds up. The pro-tagonist, a red-haired young man, is being introduced to us right from the start: In the first scene, he gathers herbs on a meadow. With a searching glance, he ensures that nobody is watching him and with a quick movement, he puts the plants in his bag. Back in his bed-sit, the young man mixes a brown unction and rubs it all over his naked body, his arms and his face. The sound of his putting on and smearing the liquid is ostensible. After a close-up of his face, hallucinogen images emerge in sequences of milliseconds: a dog, shady figures in the rain, smoke, a forest card road. A scene in his bedsit with a young woman follows and an erotic flirt-ing soon turns into a sanguinary orgy. The film ends with its first image: A dark lake that reflects the surrounding trees.
With The Clay Wall the artist manifests his general interest in the banality of magic and para-psychological phenomena, and the legends of Nordic mythology. This is testified to by his us-age of atmospheric density and the gloominess of the landscape images. The plot of the film can be taken as a modern form of juvenile escapism from an ordinary world. His immediate experience of becoming conscious is expressed with the hallucinogen images in the last scene and his encounter with the woman who acts like a femme fatale. In the film, puberty functions as a metaphor for the uncontrolled subject. Although the film contains a narrative structure, the observer is constantly being rattled, as it is difficult to classify the film within a certain genre.
In his figurative drawings and collages, Duncan Marquiss combines movable pieces of scener-ies from horror films, film classics and print media. His protagonists are drawn in a realistic style with pencil or crayon. They often seem disconcertingly displaced or suddenly disappear like ghosts. Others are portrayed as introverted figures or eccentrically move within the space. With masterly skill, Marquiss plays with indefiniteness and gaps. The artist often resorts to the motif of the werewolf or other centaurs. The transformation of an animal into a human being symbolically embodies the return to animality and to our origins. With the help of figurative stencils and stereotypes, Marquiss creates a parallel universe that only exists on paper.
Duncan Marquiss finished his career in 2005 with a Master of Fine Arts at Glasgow School of Art. He has participated at various group exhibitions. In 2005, Galerie Peter Kilchmann pre-sented his works in the exhibition Figure-Five Positions. This year, Marquiss had his first institu-tional solo exhibition at The Changing Room in Sterling (Scotland).