For its second exhibtion of 2015, Choi & Lager Galerie is presenting Collaborative Works II, recent works by British sculptor Nick Horny and the British-Balinese painter and installation artist Sinta Tantra, through July 31, 2015.
Having presented their first installment of collaborative works at One Canada Square (Canary Wharf, London) in 2013, this move to Choi & Lager offers a platform for new dialogues between their highly crafted and semiotically loaded works.
Horny and Tantra met at london's Slade School of Fine Art in the early 2000s, the artists have followed divergent career paths.
Hornby has developed a sculptural practice drawing on postmodern historicity and the referential, combining elements of classical architecture, platonic solids, and modernist sculpture. Using three- dimen-sional modeling software, the artist subtly skews, distorts, and combines silhouettes bor. rowed from well-known sculptures of art history that become recognizable only when the viewer approaches the work from multiple viewing angles. Hornby crafts these models in traditional materials such as bronze or white marble resin while maintaining the hard-edged, polygonally extruded aesthetic of the digital.
Sinta Tantra deploys a different set of historical references. Guided by her training as a painter, Tantra draws equally upon aspects of Pop and Formalism as the guiding principles of her distinctive palette and rigorously controlled pictorial structure. Tantra's work expands seamlessly from canvas to mural to installation-scale. Her hybrid aesthetics, coupled with an adaptability of scale that borrows from ar. chitectural thinking, opens up a productive discursive space for interrelated notions of iden-tity, globalization, localization and branding.
The artists share an uncanny similarity in their relationships to geometry, figura-tion, and abstraction. Both artists ask the viewer to negotiate not only the borders between physical and pictorial space, but also the intersection of personal narrative, collective culturl memeory, and the social codification of place.
In this exhibition Tantra's painted Hornby Sculptures and Honby's sculptural re-imaginings of Tantra's works set up associations and resonances between both themselves and the space.