Anne Chu, Hiroko Nakao, Jacco Olivier, Grayson Perry, Tal R, Adriana Varejão

This exhibition features six artists from Asia, the Americas and Europe whose work extends the possibility of painting beyond the canvas.

American artist Anne Chu uses a variety of media including wood, bronze, urethan and ceramic. Chu incorporates painting into unexpected materials, exploring established artistic conventions of East and West and drawing from various art making traditions. This exhibition will include a new large-scale sculptural work in the form of a hanging landscape suspended from the ceiling.

London based Japanese artist Hiroko Nakao creates elaborately layered and collaged paintings which incorporate, fabric, stitching, lace and stickers as well as motifs such as butterflies and doll like figures. Before becoming an artist Nakao studied fashion design in Tokyo and her work promotes a strong association between making clothes and painting. Slack canvases, which the artist views as “bones and skin” are dressed in ornate stitched and collaged designs.

Jacco Olivier is a young Dutch painter who uses film as a medium of reflection on his own paintings. Olivier fuses painting and the moving image in tiny animated films which invest small events with magical lyricism and at the same time illuminate the narrative process of painting.

Winner of the 2003 Turner Prize, British artist Grayson Perry is best known for his ceramic works: classically shaped vases covered with figures, patterns and text. The revealing and often dark subject matter depicted on these pots is at first disguised by their colourful, decorative appearance. His chosen topics include autobiographical images of himself, his transvestite alter ego Claire, and his family, as well as references to political events and an investigation of cultural stereotypes.

Danish artist Tal R is known for his thickly layered paintings in which solid forms and bright colours evoke associations rich in sexual innuendo, musical references and religious allusions. Tal R often establishes vivid, expressive settings within a recurrent pictorial framework comprised of three zones: a ‘heading’, used as the palette, a central area in which colour becomes form, and a lower ‘foundation’. For this exhibition Tal R has created three new fabric works, which extend further his use of material, paper and canvas collage exhibited in his solo exhibition Lords of Kolbojnik at the Victoria Miro Gallery in May this year.

The Brazilian artist Adriana Varejão explores her country’s history, culture and identity, presenting that history as one of contradiction and crossbreeding. Portuguese meets Indian in excessive, Baroque works that, like the hybrid culture of which they are a product, exist between painting, sculpture and installation. The surfaces of her ambiguous works evoke Portuguese tiles. Sometimes painted with narrative scenes and at other times referencing the clarity of Minimalism or monochrome painting, the flat tile-like surfaces are often slashed to reveal fleshy, painterly intestine-like forms that appear to erupt out of the image.