RICHARD PARRY'S BIOGRAPHY

Born Hull, 1983
Lives in London

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2012
Elephant Paintings
[opening 28th June] Bloomberg Space

Salon Neu
[opening 23rd June] Scotland's East Coast

2011
Young London
[ongoing] Civic Sculpture trail by the waters of Leith

Richard Parry: Satellite Show
The Institute of Social Hypocrisy, Paris

2010
Pop Up Book Launch
The Institute of Social Hypocrisy, Paris

Ballard In Narnia (w. Merlin Carpenter)
[ongoing] The Interzone

Richard Parry
The National Gallery of Art, Zimbabwe

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2012
Port
[opening 13th July] Galeria Nuno Centeno, Porto

2011
Richard Parry Emerging Artist Award
A Commemorative GIF & The Powerlunches Cafe, London

Dazed / Converse Emerging Artist Award
A transitory artspace & The Whitechapel Gallery, London

Post War & Contemporary Art Auction
Christie's Auctioneers, London

SELECTED ARTICLES

Richard Parry's Elephant paintings are the visual embodiments of the expanding frontiers of contemporary art. Their content reveals a series of abstract forms flavoured with just the right dose of self-awareness. The depicted suburban vignettes accommodate varied readings and the presence of the viewer suggest they are accessible and within attractive reach. Collectively Parry’s paintings comprise a catalogue of critical desire. Produced against the cultural backdrop of suburban Brockley, where even the lowliest of homes may have a satellite dish, this body of work is unexpectedly poignant in its embodiment of longing. It may look like kitsch, but the paintings in particular begin to get at what Parry means by his ‘Art Zimbabwe’ concept.
This Zimbabwe reference dates back to his notorious 2010 appropriation of the Louis Vuitton livery that he had printed onto souvenir African blankets. This series of manufactured paintings were exhibited at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in response to a curatorial request and in light of a wider cultural programme (Harare International Festival of Art). The paintings address that broad cultural yearning for something more authentic or somehow elevated – and how this is often expressed in the most clichéd manner. The work has come to embody that strangely motivating desire on the part of the viewer to know, to own, or to even be the territory or landscape displayed on the wall.
. (-Mambo Magazine, 2012)

Richard Parry talks to Lois Stonock

LOIS STONOCK: What were the signal moments for you?
RICHARD PARRY: In 2010 I had my first large museum show in Harare, Zimbabwe at The National Gallery, where my "Art Zimbabwe" blanket paintings were featured. Shortly thereafter I participated for the second time at The Institute of Social Hypocrisy in Paris and just a few months later "Young London" opened as Part of the Annuale in Edinburgh.
LS: How important was London during the 2010’s? You had lived there for more than ten years by then.
RP: At least for me, London and Harare were the centres of the Global art scene. But it was The New Dome that was able to open up the situation in London so that what was initially a provincial scene could become an international one. It was this attitude that inspired my blanket paintings. Those paintings were born out of hard criticism. It is just as important for an understanding of my work as the ongoing "New Dome" project. Like that blanket series, two things came together in my work with The New Dome: the negation of contemporary modes of art and the affirmation of a new and completely different manner of art production.
LS: Where did the impulse to make art in an expanded field come from then? Goldsmiths College where Brian Griffiths was teaching?
RP: Yes, the college, but also later projects I initiated after I had graduated, of course it wasn't just a matter of everybody suddenly starting to do stuff.
LS: Would you characterize your work as "political”?
RP: The term political is just as misleading as YBA. I am neither politicised nor an hip young artist. We have to try and get at the philosophy behind the work. I am as hungry for the meaning of art as ever. What does art mean? What is the role of the artist in society? I still want to bring into focus the first vibrant decade of the twenty-first century. But that will take time, because, in the end, the life force of art knows nothing of normal time. It makes itself known irregularly, affecting both our understanding of the past and our ability to cope with the future. What we really need is another concept of time in order to grasp the essentials of art.
This is the problem with a term like zeitgeist. It was appropriate back in the mid '90s, but today it has absolutely no meaning. The difference is that we now recognize that if art is too close to the zeitgeist it becomes mere design. It is almost impossible to recapture the utopian spirit of the past today, not only because there are no genuine cultural dialogues, but also because there is less possibility today of reconciling religious, racial, and moral differences. In my eyes, everyone in the world - including, of course, the artists - should put the questions on the table again just as they did before: "What's the reason I paint? What is the purpose of the work I carry out every day?" Only by seriously asking ourselves why we are doing what we are doing can we make more meaningful art.
LS: Wasn't it during the 2010’s that you became acknowledged internationally as an artist?
RP: Yes, that decade was decisive. To begin with, I had an exhibition in Paris. Victor Boullet gave me a one-man show in 2011. It was absolutely clear to him that an artist's work or style is not a matter of nationalism.
LS: When you started referencing Zimbabwe, did you have the feeling that people looked at you and your art differently?
RP: I am not interested in that and really didn't notice such an attitude if it indeed existed. Art is universal. That may sound like a cliché, but art is more than something material; it has to do with the spirit - you cannot fix art at a special time or location. Of course, when one looks at a Ryan Gander film, it can be better understood if you know the events of his private and professional life.
LS: Nevertheless, your paintings and publications make specific references to a ‘Zimbabwe scene’. Take for example, souvenir series of 2010 and 2011, in which pages from your Art Zimbabwe guidebooks were reprinted onto canvas as souvenirs and sold off to some pretty serious collectors.
RP: In my paintings, symbols associated with Zimbabwe function as kinds of clichés insofar as they stand for an awareness of a wider situation beyond yourself. That is one of the reasons I chose Zimbabwe: To make it taboo would be regressive,. The souvenir paintings indicate that matters of heedless cultural consumption, containment and laundering are far from over, being it in Zimbabwe or - from the perspective of now - the malicious terrorism emanating from the Middle East. Evil takes root and flourishes when art and freedom of expression are censored or mediated into meaninglessness, whether in Zimbabwe, National Socialist Germany, in Afghanistan under the Taliban or even here. (-The Real Ale Emporium, 2011)

Excerpt from Q&A w. Terance Teh

What are your themes you are working with in your current work, what are you looking to explore?
Young London is a radical sculpture trail made for the Edinburgh Annuale last month. I named 30 life-size asparagus sculptures after artworks in a recent conservative exhibition called ‘Young London’, then I commissioned a radical London art collective to install them along the banks of the Leith in Scotland, and make me a hip documentary film in the process.

How does your city affect your work? Are there any over arching local sources of inspiration?
I’ve made exhibitions and individual works across a range of cities and places, and in this way they were all pretty interchangeable. That was kind of the point. My Satellite Show in Paris was more about going to another city as a decorative thing, a life-style thing than an affective process worth understanding.

How important is public interactivity with your work?
You’d be surprised; the people in Harare, they’re a bit more on the ball than the people you’d meet in London. There are 18 year olds who know things it would take a curator here 10 years to find out. You get girls with buck teeth who’ve been working on farms and hardly speak English - they know where I’m coming from and exactly what I’m saying.

Can you talk about your feelings on being part of the upcoming London Dazed exhibition?
The thing with me is I can’t talk about my feelings, I find it very difficult.

Has humour always been important in your work?
Not to me. I actually take what I do very seriously – It’s the wider conditions I’m frivolous with.

Was sculpture your initial medium that you were inspired by?
When I started looking at art, the stuff I liked I could only half understand – paintings by Jorg Immendorff and Zimbabwe stone sculptures in books. (-Dazed & Confused Magazine, Europe 2011).

C'est q’un Satellite Show?, T Bath (trans. Anna Franck)

The year was 2011, and the show was an act typical of Richard Parry, who had already tweaked the art world with a satirical catalogue for a semi-fictitious art fair. This time he took aim at the countless travelling exhibitions, fascinated with an international zeitgeist that he had seen in fashionable art galleries:
“It seemed like an accessory you had to have to be part of an intellectual cultural elite” Said Mr. Parry, whose conceptually playful work, which combines Pop Art’s puckish humour with the serene and minimal qualities of Minimalism, is now spread out in a new exhibition at the ISH in Paris. “I don’t think it has anything to do with gaining a wider understanding of the world. It’s pure escapism. Its decoration, a life-style thing.”
But Mr. Parry embraced this articulation by making his own travelling exhibition of sculptures; one that blended needs for overnight accommodation shared by the artist and supporters who flew to Paris to witness the vernissage of their friend: The exhibition was dominated by the sculptural and chromatic impact of countless bright yellow Lilos, complete with PVC aroma and beer with beer labels featuring the artist smiling inanely within an earlier holiday abroad.” (-Journal des Arts, Paris 2011)

Competition Entry, R. Parry

These paintings involvea mobile, often glossy surface that is often scraped or ruptured to reveal a thicker mass of oil paint beneath the thinner faster-drying emulsion layer.

This layer is pressurised by the underlying oil paint, gravity and its relative material differences. This leads to unpredictable passages of shrinkage, puckering, slippage, distortion, expulsion (of linseed oil) or other combinations of the painting itself.

The tension between a cosmetic surface image and underlying material places the picture plane under continuous interrogation by these wider conditions. The visual symptoms happen as the painting dries, cracking, expressing oil, sliding down, or otherwise reconciling itself to other things.

Some of the paintings contain generic logos (for example those of Jurassic 5 or N.W.A hip-hop music groups). Other repeated motifs include the Kabaa, Dora the Explorer, and third-world dentistry.

Perhaps the representation of these symbols celebrates, incants or interrogates any inherent meaning or value within them and their incorperation. Or perhaps by critically containing them through the medium of painting itself, the work (like the representations therein) is present in an ironic stasis of cultural containment / decorative potential.

Du Hvor er min Kunst, Prof. J Veiteberg (trans. V. Boullet)

“As a leading avant-garde artist, Richard Parry is building his reputation on his coolly analytical conceptually-informed style, designed to critically reveal Contemporary Art’s stifling visual and creative culture. Whilst his works represent the art or people of other cultures, they emerge from Parry’s virulent critique of visual culture's expanding commercial markets, their mediators and the heedless embrace of global consumption” ( -Billedkunst, Norway 2011)

People Keep Asking: - What's Art Zimbabwe?, S. Levack and J. Lewondowski

"Most of what's passing for information right now is total fiction" Parry remarked, "I try to turn the lie back in on itself". In doing so he also challenges the traditional role of the artist as creator, and the very meaning of creation, while presenting an alternative definition of what an art space can be. (-Horizon Hypnotique press release, 2010)

New Dome & Company, Christie's

Derived from counterfeit Louis Vuitton printing-processes and airport-bought African blankets, the current work, exhibited in the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, is comprised of 12 unique blankets in a range of traditional patterns. Superlative technical ease with a complex understanding of the implications of our present, and with an attention to the moral marshes of liberal thought, Richard Parry seeks to express the inexpresible. The current work of fifteen paintings addresses a typically oblique correspondence between an exquisitely private narrative and an historical reckoning. A tale of socio-political conditions is played out in a counterfeited Louis Vuttion – drenched landscape where only glamour and History tread. Yet as always with Richard Parry’s art, the framing of the material and the interplay between image surface and depth, suggests the artist’s more complex relationship with representation and perception and the heritage of liberalism and global innocence. ( -MULTIPLIED catalogue, 2010)

Excerpt from www.ballardinnarnia.com

The warderobe as ballardian firewall - gateway, stargate. In a certain sense we could say that 'Narnia' has always already become an IP address, and indeed, aslan lives! He prowls the industrial wasteland interzone of our minds... the "lea" zone... a sea of melted turkish delight... where joy division nightly play. On a Ballardian river of tears, on a raft of Narnian intensities, This is how the interzone is accessed? Real snow behind the wardrobe a paradox of cocaine but OMG somebody died here in a car CRASH. I believe the emotional aspects inherent in such an act could be described as Deleuzian. Welcome to the HARD parade. Lock stock and two smoking ballards.... a guided tour of your own mind. The space is too Ballard now, needs to be more Narnia. On 21 Jun 2010, at 10:56, Merlin Carpenter wrote:

"Got to do the show in "the zone", its cool", he said, "Sadly because of the volcano in Iceland, the the Chapman brothers couldn't make Ballard In Narnia'"

Then Richard enjoined: "What's an assistant?"

A beleagured Lionic voice, lion with a swollen belly because he has just EATEN THE ILLUSTRIOUS J G BALLARD,
replied from the Christian wilderness:

1. Me
2. Undecided
3. Undecided
4. Undecided
5. Philipa Horan
6. Undecided
7. The man with a beetroot for a head who runs Gallery "Are-you-SURE-you-want-to-change-beetroot-head-reference-will-he-respect-us-if-we-now-change-it- it-is-like-apologising-it-was-maybe-over-the-top-I-agree-but-now- we-have-done-it-shouldn't-it-stand-we-could-potentially-be-taking-the-ONLY-critical-element-out-of-the-"Work"" Hotel....
8. Cyprian Bronstein
9. Bids assistant south Kensington
10. Turps Banana marketing intern

11. powerful artworld figures

"what are artists / curators but modern day wizards?" !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! "
Ballard is Aslan....This ones 4 U J G!, a hug from teh genreatins of artists U influened.

"Meet you Tuesday 5 pm Cafe Otto, in Dalston?" said Richard Perry (-www.ballardinnarnia.com)

Press Release courtesy of Tony Pearson

BOINGIntroduction to working with children End of unit summary City Lit The centre for adult learning.
Unit 1 Create a safe environment for children
Learner comments:
· Frie exstie +Number of toilet, wash bassin
· frie blagket +Plag caver
· frie exchsar +have equtment at the bottom
· kiling prodat luck away +light equtment at the top
+equtment box shuld laballed

"Properly handled, boredom can be an antidote to our nationalizmus dependence on curating. True freedom meanz seing conscious and aware genau to schoose what you pay achtungsheit to and to chüse how you construct meiningung from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be a curator. Maybe dullness is associated mit psychic schmerz, weil etwas langweilig oder opaque fails to provide genau ßtimulation to dißtract people from ßome other, tiefer type of curatorial pain das ist immer there, wenn nur in ein ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly alle our zeit und energy trying to curate ourselves from, or 'selbst-aus-gecuratete'." -Adolf Hitler, from his BA exam essay, 1896.
Visit www.christ.com to explore special multi-needia sale promotions, brownnose, or illustrate cats and leave absentee birds through LotFinger(R), Christ's online teach engine, Matthew, Mark, Look at John and register for Internet bidding with Christ's Live(TM).This message are confidential. If you are not the intended recipient, please phone or email hi the sender and attachment from your system. If you are not the intended recipient you must copy this mess or attach or dis an other person. "

"Hi TONY PEARSON I'm at work, I've emailed all my friends who work in arts administration for buzzwords - please see below. Hope you are well. I am well too buzz words- 'multi-cultural', 'pushing boundaries', 'cross instiutuional', 'mixed race' ( OR COLOURED ), 'audience development' 'On the f********g non shy' or 'is not shy', 'it was all dream, I used to read 'word up' magazine' Tony Pearsons writing my press release - he needs some buzzwords re me / my work can you help supply??? FTMkeep pecking in the dirt FOR SEEDS you stupidHUNGRY goose. "Lisa Penny talked to me about you for about 45 mins on friday night- i was the most boring part of the evening" UNDERSCORE "I". "I WAS THE MOST BORING PART OF THE EVENING". YNI Joels was good- I am a fan- I am sorry I missed yours though- did you firm up your position in the art mafia? are you now 'contextualised'- this is a now word.saw ed on saturday FYI- ON THE NON SHY>talked to me about you for about 45 mins on friday night- i was the most boring part of the evening.FNSWALOTHow was joel's? N.D. followers mobbed Greek st, art mafia action, show historic - FYINYE"
In my opinion Richard 'New Dome' Parry makes large oil paintings with a strong leaning towards the handsomely 'ironic', i.e. they mean the opposite of their overt meaning, or they mean something else as a bonus to their overt meaning, but like an hip person about town, they don't want to forget about looking good when asserting emphatically, through behaviour and output, that art and having fun are both serious endeavours which bleed into each other to illustrate the Law that an artist is only a person who lives as an artist all the time, i.e. all day, every day, and only a person who lives all day every day as an artist, is an artist. God; except maybe at Christmas when you have to explain something to your grandmother or father. "Why did you do a painting of a racial person or indeed present no painting at all, Richard?" "Er Look, Dad, I'm not really an artist at Christmas... Could we just get on with making the bread sauce together, and talk about that?"

Unit 2 Work as part of a team
Learner comments:
· Team member was taking down some pictures of wale and I offer to help her thake them bown
Unit 3 Contribute to equality of opportunity in support of children's development
Learner comments:
· A child who is in a wealchair has to have axssas to all the activities. indoor and outdoor. 18 years old new in town i like my job a and o levels no waiting no long boring intros hotel visits
Unit 4 Provide a range of appropriate play activities for children
Learner comments:
· coold cocking
·
· play dough
· water sports

Richard Parry
Elephant Paintings

Information to follow.

[opening 28th June]

Richard Parry
Salon Neu

Information to follow.

[opening 23rd June]

Richard Parry
Art Zimbabwe: $100 000 000 000

acrylic on mirrored glass

2 parts each measuring 64x150cm

Richard Parry
Art Zimbabwe: $100 000 000 000 000

acrylic on mirrored glass

160 x 80cm

vendu / sold

Richard Parry
Satellite Show

multiple variously-titled sculptures in various venues

dimensions variable

vendu / sold

Richard Parry
Young London

Public Sculpture trail along the waters of Leith in Edinburgh; in 30 parts with associated photography archive and commissioned documentary film

Richard Parry
untitled

mixed media

vendu / sold

Richard Parry
Barack Obama Scatter Cushions

Souvenir kangas, bought, sewn together and forwarded from Kenya to London for onward exhibition.

multiple parts, each 150x100x50cm approx

vendu / sold

Richard Parry
Pop-Up Book Launch

enhanced book launch event/s

Richard Parry
Art Zimbabwe Blanket Paintings (details)

souvenir tribal blankets purchased by a curator and screenprinted locally en route to exhibition at the National Gallery of Harare's International Art Festival event.

120 x 120 (stretched) in 20 parts

15 sold / 5 remaining

Richard Parry
Dentist Paintings

oil and emulsion on 5 canvases

8 x 10 inches each

Richard Parry
Jurassic 5 studies

8 x 10 inches each

Richard Parry
Genuine Souvenir Canvas Prints

ink on canvas w. frame; series of unique works representing a to-be published art catalogue / guidebook

19 x 25cm each

sold out

Richard Parry
Mecca

oil and emulsion on canvas

8 x 10 inches

Richard Parry
LOVE

oil and emulsion on canvas

50x60cm

Richard Parry
Remember Peter Tosh

oil, emulsion and stickers on canvas, frame

52 x 63cm

Richard Parry
Interns

oil and emulsion on canvas

180 x 100cm approx.

Richard Parry
Swastika Painting

Oil on canvas

220 x 180cm approx.

Richard Parry
Philanthropy

posters / flyers and associated competition

A0 / A5, in 15,000 parts

sold out

Richard Parry
-What's A Computer

prefaced by The Sound of Downloading Makes Me Want to Upload

published by Frenetic Happiness

sold out

Richard Parry
Art Zimbabwe 2010

Art Fair & catalogue

published by The New Dome

sold out

Richard Parry
New Dome & Company

catalogue

published by The New Dome

sold out

Richard Parry
centrefold

published in Dazed & Confused Magazine

sold out

Richard Parry
Mbare Fine Art

Acrylic on mirrored glass

90 x 115cm approx.