Some Domestic Incidents An exhibition of new painting from Britain MAC Birmingham, UK September - November 2011 Following its successful presentation at the Prague Biennale 5 in the summer of 2011, Some Domestic Incidents then moved to MAC Birmingham, featuring new works created especially for this edition of the exhibition. www.macarts.co.uk Some Domestic Incidents:  An exhibition of new painting from Britain Prague Biennale 5, Czech Republic May - Sep 2011 For most people in the developed world home is a place where we can be at ease – a personal space shared with partners, family and friends. It is a site of sanctuary from the world outside, for everyday activities such as sleeping, cooking a meal, watching a film or raising a family. While many of us are fortunate to live such lives, we all experience things in and around our homes that adversely effect our physical, psychological and emotional relationships with the places in which we live. This might be a burglary, an argument, the death of a loved one, an accident or a visit from the bailiffs. For others, home is a place that is constantly oppressive and filled with melancholy, loneliness or misery – a site of entrapment, discomfort or abuse. Some Domestic Incidents presents works by seven artists from Britain that connect to the theme of domesticity and explore how normative relationships with homes can be affected. Artists: Graham Chorlton, Oliver Clegg, Anna M R Freeman, Philip Hale, Justin Mortimer, Sally Payen, Caroline Walker. The exhibition has been curated by Matt Price with Charlie Levine, and will travel to MAC Birmingham in September 2011. Supported by Arts Council England and the National Lottery. www.praguebiennale.org Under the Radar: Paintings by Serban Savu Pitzhanger Manor (PM Gallery & House), London March - May 2011

Under the Radar is the first ever solo exhibition in a public institution of the paintings of Romanian artist Serban Savu. Featuring new and recent works, the exhibition presents Savu's distinctive and poignant scenes of everyday life in Romania, populated by figures who seem strangely detached from the post-Communist world around them. The exhibition is curated by Simon Nastac and Matt Price, and organised in association with the Romanian Cultural Institute, London. Launched to coincide with the exhibition is a new publication about the artist published by Hatje Cantz. With a foreword by David Nolan, and featuring texts by Rozalinda Borcila and David Cohen, the publication will be available online, in shops and from the gallery. www.ealing.gov.uk/pmgalleryandhouse

The Witching Hour: Darkness and the Architectural Uncanny Pitzhanger Manor (PM Gallery & House), London January - March 2011 Following the success of the first edition, this version of the show, hosted by Pitzhanger Manor (PM Gallery & House) in Ealing, London, focuses on darkness and the architectural uncanny and features 10 of the original 22 artists who participated in the edition shown at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery's Waterhall in November 2010 as part of Art of Ideas.  The Witching Hour exhibition was originally conceived and curated by Matthew Collings and Matt Price, and has been developed for PM Gallery by Matt Price in association with Carol Swords, director of PM Galllery, and Vanessa Moore, exhibitions organiser.  The exhibition presents photography, painting and film by: Richard Billingham, Graham Chorlton, Ravi Deepres (with Michael Baig-Clifford), Chris Keenan, Idris Khan, Sally Payen, Ged Quinn, David Rowan, Toby de Silva, and George Shaw. www.ealing.gov.uk/pmgalleryandhouse The Witching Hour: Darkness and the Uncanny Waterhall, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, UK November 2010

Curated by Matthew Collings and Matt Price, The Witching Hour is an exhibition that explores darkness and the uncanny in the work of over 20 artists from, or based in, Birmingham and the West Midlands, including internationally renowned artists such as Hurvin Anderson, Richard Billingham, Roger Hiorns, George Shaw and Gillian Wearing, along with some of the region's leading emerging artists.  Supposedly the time of night when strange things happen, the witching hour is associated with the supernatural, witchcraft and folklore, represented in the form of baroque skeletons, macabre fighting insects, shadowy figures, ghoulish faces and ritualistic paraphernalia.  But it is also an exhibition about something perhaps even more unsettling: the darkness that pervades everyday life, whether in the architecture of an abandoned factory, a run-down 1970s housing estate, or in people's own homes. It is an exhibition about the disconcerting, strange and uncanny that exists in our built environment, our social fabric and sometimes purely in our own minds. The exhibition has been organised as part of Art of Ideas, a project initiated by Arts Council England and led by Arts & Business that aims to promote collecting of contemporary art in the West Midlands.

Grief and Oblivion Trove, Birmingham October - November 2010

An exhibition of works by Sally Payen, Viv Sole and Jane Tudge, curated by Charlie Levine and Matt Price. The title of this exhibition takes its name from chapter 1 of volume 6 of Marcel Proust's A la Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time/Remembrance of Things Past). The exhibition explores the themes of war, violence, death, loss and remembrance through painting, sculpture, installation, animation and book art. http://trove.org.uk

Justin Mortimer: In Your Own Village Master Piper, London January - March 2010

A graduate of the Slade School of Art in the early 1990s, Justin Mortimer is a painter based in London. A first prize winner of the BP Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery, he also won the EAST Award at EAST International in 2004, selected by Neo Rauch and Gerd Harry Lybke. With particular emphasis on the relationships between the human body, landscape and architecture, his practice addresses the themes of pain, suffering, injury and deformity, often in the context of war or armed conflict, though the identity of the protagonists, victims, locations and moment in time always remain unclear. Infused with an equal ambiguity as to what exactly has been taking place, the recent works are powerful, challenging and disturbing paintings depicting the aftermath of the incomprehensible suffering that humans can inflict on their fellow men. www.masterpiper.com

Graham Chorlton: Hotel Minerva

Master Piper, London

September - October 2009

The exhibition, the artist's first at a commercial gallery in London, features 15 recent and new paintings by Birmingham-based painter Graham Chorlton, including several from the Bristol Road series first exhibited at the University of Birmingham in 2008. In addition to having exhibited in East, Norwich, John Moores, Liverpool, and Ikon, Birmingham, Chorlton has had solo shows at venues such as the Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham, University College, Worcester, and Library Gallery, University of Warwick. He was recently awarded first prize for painting in the Leamington Gallery Open and The Birmingham Open at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. He was also awarded the De Vere's Prize at the Royal Hibernian Academy annual exhibition, Dublin, in 2007. This is the third exhibition in the programme of Master Piper, London, established by Nicholas Rhodes in April 2009. www.masterpiper.com

Adrian Ghenie: Works on Paper

Plan B, Berlin

October - December 2008

Plan B is pleased to present an exhibition of new and recent work by Romanian artist Adrian Ghenie (b. 1977, Baia-Mare, Romania). The second exhibition at Plan B’s Berlin branch, this is the first exhibition of works on paper by the artist, not only offering an insight into the process by which Ghenie constructs the complex compositions, narratives and vocabularies of his works, but also demonstrating his mastery of the mediums of drawing and collage. The exhibition runs concurrently, and in many ways in parallel, with two other exhibitions by the artist, the first of which is being held in the UK as part of the Liverpool Biennial. The second takes place at Plan B’s neighbour, Nolan Judin Berlin. 

The exhibition was supported by the Romanian Cultural Institute in Berlin. www.plan-b.ro

Sound in Z

Palais de Tokyo, Paris

September 2008 - January 2009

Sound in Z is an exhibition of audio, visual, textual and documentation material that revolves around the archives of the Theremin Centre, Moscow – an institution whose history is inextricably interwoven with the development of music and audio technology in Russia during the 20th Century, and which is now a part of the Moscow State Conservatory. The exhibition has been developed as a part of Generation Z, an ongoing project by Andrei Smirnov and Lubov Pchelkina that is attempting ‘to restore the history and culture of the artistic Utopia of the 1910s and 1920s that was destroyed through its collision with the totalitarian state of the 1930s’. Sound in Z offers an introduction to some of the key figures of the period and their areas of research. Some of the featured documentation, sound and footage has not previously been made available in the West and tantalizingly offers just a taste of the material from the period that remains to be explored. The exhibition forms part of From One Revolution to Another – a series of exhibitions initiated by Jeremy Deller at the request of the Palais de Tokyo. The exhibition is curated by Andrei Smirnov and Matt Price, with assistant curator Christina Steinbrecher, and is scheduled to be included in the Moscow Biennial, 2009. A publication relating to the project is currently in development by Sound and Music, London, and Koenig Books, Cologne.

Binary Oppositions

CITRIC, Brescia, Italy

October 2007 - January 2008

Binary Oppositions is an exhibition of 10 emerging artists based in Birmingham, UK, in which polarities and contrasts are integral to the works. The show places particular emphasis on lo fi culture in a hi fi world through works that address the analogue and the digital, nostalgia and the new, the handmade and the industrially produced, the manual and the electric. Through media as diverse as drawing, handcrafts, collage, digital imagery, sculpture, photography, film and animation, the exhibition casually raises questions about tradition and progress, folklore and technology, myth and rationalism, modernity and postmodernity. 

To accompany the exhibition, Static Caravan, one of the UK’s leading independent record labels, has released a compilation album of music by 20 artists and bands from Birmingham whose work resonates with the themes of the show. The Binary Oppositions album, featuring 21 tracks ranging from music concrete to electronica, from post-rock to folk music, was curated by Geoff Dolman (Static Caravan) and Matt Price, and released in an edition of 500 copies. A catalogue also accompanied the exhibition, designed by Ben Javens and published by Citric Gallery. www.citricgallery.com