Intimate Space
Anish Kapoor, Yuko Shiraishi, FAT

curated by Rajesh Punj

7 January - 11 February 2006

Private View Friday 6th January 6 - 9

Ideas are visualised, energy is pressed onto paper, drawing and unsolicited ideas are as fundamental and as resonant to contemporary visual practice as anything more readily associated with the product of the artist or designer. INTIMATE SPACE approaches the work of three incredibly different creative practitioners, the Japanese painter and colourist Yuko Shiraishi (Annely Juda Gallery), the architectural and design firm FAT and the internationally acclaimed sculptor Anish Kapoor (Lisson Gallery). Each has been invited to exhibit newly commissioned works or unseen drawings in an attempt to find something unreasonable, unrealised and without proven direction; encapsulating the discharges of energy that register as art. The works in this exhibition seek a return to something simpler; a space where ideas are bereft of formal concerns and akin more to an intuitive act that rests between impulse and calculation, an intimate space, between the idea and the artist.

Yuko Shiraishi has contributed a new commission that challenges the very foundation of her practice and our ideas of what a drawing is for a formal painter. The three-dimensional work is a poetic and incredibly fragile physical drawing. Yuko Shiraishi has been locked in a dialogue between colour and formal space for the past 23 years and this piece will be one of her rare departures from painting. Shiraishi's work takes much of its strength from an essential paradox: that of their apparent extreme simplicity and bluntness yielding to unexpected subtleties.

The London based architectural & design firm FAT are a collaboration of architects, artists and designers drawn together to deal with the creative space between Architecture, Art and Design. Working with notions of experience and possibility, they take a radical departure from the more formal properties of an architectural, design firm. They describe themselves as 'interested in making work that explores the experiences, contradictions and possibilities of the modern world'. For INTIMATE SPACE they have produced a series of new works that go someway to explaining their concerns, their interests and their ideas.

Anish Kapoor, is an accomplished artist of international reputation, well known for works that vary in scale and dynamic. For MOT, Kapoor has contributed very simple drawings that have gone unnoticed and unseen by a wider audience, until now. These are pressed ideas that are incomplete or unrealised and that pose questions about his practice. These incredibly intimate and quite vulnerable works realise an essence of Kapoor and form a context for his more monumental works. Kapoor describes a quest to discover'content' for his works. 'You cannot intellectually discover a content. It's in some mysterious interplay with material, with form, with scale, somewhere, perhaps, a content emerges. It's about the intelligence to hold it, work with it, help it grow and let it help you grow. And I feel that's what the real work is: to discover a content; the rest is peripheral.' (Anish Kapoor, interviewed for Icon, Marcus Fairs)

Almost all artists return to drawing, the basic core of most visual practice. The architect relies upon this mode of production until there is a client willing to realise their potential buildings. INTIMATE SPACE performs a modest act in engaging between disciplines and encouraging us to view this private originality.