COSMOS - Reverse Perspective

Collages by Fred Scott, Liz Davis, Marina Sokolowa and Gleb Sobolev Text by Pierre D’Avoine

The following is an extract from the Exhibition Catalogue for COSMOS - Reverse Perspective, a group exhibition featuring work by Fred Scott, Liz ‘Buffy’ Davis, Marina Sokolowa and Gleb Sobolev and curated by Sobolev and the architect Pierre D’Avoine. The exhibition opened in Moscow in 2020 and was also held online at Puskin House in London in April 2021.

Here we present a selection of work from the exhibition together with accompanying text on the exhibition by Pierre D’Avoine.

P D’A I have known Fred since the early 1970s when I was an architectural student in Birmingham. Fred was teaching a diploma unit at the AA and had a reputation as a great teacher and brilliant lecturer. We would travel to London just to hear Fred speak, and later got to know him because I had friends who were his students at the Royal College of Art. I recall meeting Fred at a party, in those days, standing at a window and telling me that the had been taking a photograph from the window of his flat in Notting Hill Gate every day over a period of many years. He said he was interested in the way that the photograph captured the everyday street scene. I imagine the set-up would have been composed once maybe at the outset and would have included a band of sky at the top as an equally quotidian element.

Buffy is an artist whose practice includes painting, collage and mixed media. Her latest work ranges from assemblages of pressed wild flowers, plants and found objects that appear in the interstices of the Square Mile (City of London), that are part scientific documentation and part artful arrangement, to textiles beautifully made in thick layered materials that are ambiguous about their use. The botanical specimens are held in the archive of the Natural History Museum in London.

Fred in his book On Altering Architecture has written on collage including this extract:

‘Regarding composition, allegiance to a particular style is usually the source of cohesion, consistency and coherence in architecture, and in other things. Such an allegiance can be almost religious in its intensity, and to stand outside of it might be considered heretical. One might reasonably claim that the great developments of architecture and design in the last century were manifestations of just such allegiances. Such purity of production is unavailable to the interventional designer. She or he must seek other paths to composition, among which is collage, a means to engage confrontation and contradiction in composition. This is a territory of real difficulty. The usual reliance on purity of style for coherence is familiar to all, but the results of its absence are far less certain.’

The brilliant discoveries across the fields of science, the humanities and the arts made at the beginning of the 20th century have changed the way we understand the world. As artists, designers, architects, how we think and act is inevitably driven by these discoveries. They have opened up our eyes and imaginations to latent possibilities and at the same time they have also undermined the certainty of progress.

The four artists in this exhibition use collage in very different ways and their work is a fortuitous coming together in a consideration of the theme Space - Reverse Perspective.

NOTES

Thanks to Fred Scott, Liz Davis and Pierre D’Avoine for sharing their work with us.

For more information on the exhibition see the Puskin House website.

The Exhibition Catalogue for COSMOS - Reverse Perspective can be downloaded here.

Posted April 9th 2021.