Not What It Seems...

From the John Snijders collection.                               21st November - 19th December 2024

The role of the contemporary art collector is vital to the survival and thriving of any creative scene. Platform A has worked closely with collector John Snijders to curate an exhibition made up of works from his collection to provide insights towards an understanding of the thinking behind what fuels the desire to own particular artworks.  This exhibition explores the relationship between gallerist, artist and collector and shares the fascinating thoughts and concepts that lay beneath the surface of these works and underpin their creation. These works have become public again and although they bring an astonishing aesthetic beauty, they are not always what they seem at first sight, but what they become when investigated. It is not only the artists’ ideas on display here however, but also the passion and reasoning within the personality of the collector shattering the illusion of the collector as an abstract being operating behind the scenes of the creative sector.

Slowly We Rot

Gordon Dalton                                                            26th September - 7th November 2024

Gordon Daltons work focuses on a small stretch of coast that includes places of personal importance including Runswick Bay, Staithes, Port Mulgrave, Skinningrove and ending in Middlesbrough, overlooking the UK's first Freeport. The work in Slowly We Rot has a disinterested curiosity that is both critical and celebratory of these places. They are viewed equally with disdain and affection, reverberating ad-infinitum between a familiar and a strange apprehension of this haunted land. The paintings act as 'parafictions' about place attachment. They are portals to another time in the past, present, or future where a slow violence is inflicted upon these landscapes.

Legacy                                                                    Lothar Götz, Emma Bennett, Loucey Bain                   1st August - 5th September 2024

In 2014 Platform A presented a solo exhibition of the work of Lothar Götz. The idea was to have Götz mentor an emerging artist with a visual language with some similarities to his own.  Götz shared some of his techniques and ideas with the mentee during the installation. The emerging artist then went on to establish herself as a significant practitioner. That mentee was Emma Bennett. Her work has since developed in terms of colour, composition and scale and, like Götz, regularly makes reference to architecture. Legacy brings recent work from these two artists together for a visual conversation that is augmented by the work of an emerging artist and new mentee, Loucey Bain. Bain’s brutalist plasterboard sculptures bring physicality to the ideas of Götz and Bennett. The outcome is a three-way visual dialogue around colour and form underlined by the importance of strengthening professional relationships as the legacy continues.

Between Here and There
Lesley Hicks                                                                23^rd May- 4^th July 2024

‘Between Here and There’ showcases the work of Lesley Hicks, presenting a creative process juxtaposing drawing and performance within a collaboration between a human female and non-human web cameras. Initiated by an encounter with a road traffic website that monitors the conditions of roads countrywide in Iceland, the project began with a series of drawn responses to grainy roadside imagery and has since developed into the artist involving her own body in the Icelandic landscape. Reflecting on the constructions of subjectivities in relation to contrasting experiences of landscape which draw upon conditions of detachment, embodiment and sexual difference, the work moves towards a renewed understanding of what it is to look at, and represent, images of landscape now.

Perpetual Arrival  
Isabel Albrecht, Morrissey & Hancock, Silvia Lerin, David Batchelor, Rana Begum, Eleanor Wood, Thomas Vinson, Nathan Cohen, Mikael Fagerlund, Andy Harper, Michael Samuels, Jyll Bradley, Mark Francis, Eric Butcher, Eric Cruikshank.  
28th September - 9th November 2023

Perpetual Arrival conceives of the creative process as a continuum punctuated by a series of moments – or arrivals – when circumstances converge to result in something that is generally agreed to constitute a work of art. We pursue our lines of enquiry, research our subject matter, marshal our evidence, manipulate and explore our materials. Periodically we arrive at something that is often treated as though it were a conclusion, but the reality for many of us is actually that it is just one point of arrival among a lifetime of similar arrivals and departures. We move on to create other points of arrival. Arrivals can act as a break, a chance to take stock, to stand back and learn from the intervening time and process. Then we move on. 

Dust 
Jo Sperryn- Jones
29^th June– 10th August 2023

Jo Sperryn-Jones’ practice explores the experience of ‘breaking’. Initially, this was an investigation into why breaking several bones, through mountain biking, affected her aesthetic preferences. This opened up a multi-faceted response to breaking, loss and celebration, embracing a cycle of life, change and chance. Loss and union combine as a response to both recent bereavement and marriage.

Drawn Together
Lesley Hicks, Nick Kennedy, Richard Forster, Christina Hesford, Brígida Baltar, Linda Karshan, Trevor Frankland, Jack Whitten.
20^th April – 1^st June 2023

Drawn Together is a collaboration between Platform A Gallery and MIMA. Four artists connected to Platform A, whose practice has a strong relationship to drawing, are paired with works from the MIMA collection.

BOOT
Suzy Babington, Tony Charles, Adam Gillam, Clive Hodgson, Kathy MacCarthy, Ida Nissen, Fabian Peake, Giulia Ricci, Neil Zakiewicz.
19th January - 2nd March 2023

Nine artists celebrate the working process and
through a wide range of practices share an
obsession with materials. Whilst leaning towards
abstraction, other subordinate narratives drift in
and at times overlap. 

ON GOING
Michaela Zimmer
13th October -24th November 2022

Michaela Zimmer’s artistic work concentrates on the visualization of physical movement, the aspect of reverberation due to repetition and the question of how its data can be transformed into artwork.

From Gesture to Geometry
Rachael Clewlow, Sarah Cooney, Lorraine Lawler, Ulla Pedersen, Theresa Poulton, Francesca Simon
1st September -  29th September 2022     

The practice of non-objective painting that erupted in the early 20^th century was soon divided into two camps; gestural abstraction, that built upon the loose compositions of the post-impressionists, and geometric abstraction, that was inspired by Euclidean geometric shapes and rejected the notion of gesture and the trace of the artist’s hand.

South Bank to Southbank
Jo Stanness.
16^th June – 29^th July 2022

South Bank to Southbank is a project examining and celebrating the aesthetics of post-war architecture between London’s Southbank and South Bank in Middlesbrough. For her first solo exhibition, Jo explores the geometry, design and space of brutalist and modernist structures. Building on previous collages and paintings, this work investigates drawing in two- and three-dimensions, as well as ‘drawing’ with light and shadow. These 3D drawings borrow from the language of architecture and architects’ models. They reimagine existing buildings in a purely aesthetic sense. Here, unlike the original architectural agenda, form need not follow function.

Babel
Jonny Green
24^th March – 12^th May  2022

Jonny Green makes paintings of sculptures… Mad-men rendered crudely in plasticine and electrical tape or abject-looking re-animated brains adorned with filthy paper flowers and grubby clockwork parts. Each depicted object/character seems to be demanding recognition and validation from the viewer in spite of their manifest flaws, they seem to be trying to adorn themselves in an attempt to make their appearance more palatable. In contrast to the gleeful, almost slapdash making of the sculptures, their subsequent rendering in paint is meticulous.

Endless Dance
Nick Kennedy
4^th February – 11th March 2022

For his second solo show at Platform A, Kennedy presents recent work in a variety of media including, drawing, painting and sculpture. Kennedy’s work playfully parodies science, the dominant ontological pursuit of our time, sharing its aim to unearth truths about the natural world and our relationship with it. The exhibition offers a reductive, abstract visual language drawn from a variety of interests including, horology, electrical circuits, symbols and glyphs, patterns in nature, X-ray crystallography imagery and quantum mechanics.

Ten Years 
Lorraine Brown, Alex Charrington, Tony Charles, Nicola Ellis, Jo Hamill, Alexis Harding, Annie O’Donnell, Will Hughes, Emma Bennett, Jo McGonigal, Mike Collier, Nick Kennedy, Phil Illingworth, Rachael Clewlow, Sally Taylor, Phil Gatenby, Francesca Simon, Roberto Picciau, Lothar Goetz, DJ Simpson, William Tillyer.
25th November - 4th January 2022 

A decade of exhibitions at Platform A Gallery has brought many interesting and exciting projects throughout some very difficult times, such as the fallout from the 2008 economic crash and, of course, the recent pandemic.

Looking Good and Feeling Fine 
Will Hughes 
26^th August – 7^th October 2021

For their first solo show at Platform A and in the North East, Will Hughes will show a selection of sculptural works which focus on material language, personal experiences and class.

Placed
Jonathan Chapman
18th September - 30th October 2020
My camera is my dog, it changes me from sad loner to purposeful flaneur. When I returned to this region, like a dog, I wanted to be outside exploring this new familiar place.

Flying Carpet
Leslaw Tetla
20 February – 2 April 2020 
Lesław Tetla is interested in the fabric of the city as written onto its architectural modules. He examines the subcutaneous geometry that channels the movements of city residents, shaping their attitudes and types of behavior. In the new project, he creates sequences of paintings depicting the façades of traditional English houses in Stockton and Middlesbrough, which are now populated by immigrant communities.