The Cat Street Gallery in association with Roberta Moore Fine Art
The Cat Street Gallery, in association with Roberta Moore Fine Art, is proud to present Lipstick/Vogue, the first solo show in Asia for the young British artist Stuart Semple. Semple is causing a storm in the London and New York art scenes and is already hailed as one of the brightest stars in a new generation of post-pop artists. Semple’s drawing, painting and printmaking re-articulate pop cultural elements into a unique personal universe of glamour, aspiration, fear, isolation and nostalgia. His works balance a fabricated mechanized perfection with an emotive painterly surface. Semple has always found the process of image-making fascinating and takes his passion to the next level in this collection of new works.
Lipstick/Vogue takes as its starting point the phenomenon of luxury boutique items and the place they hold in the image-making world. The works balance chic, saturated hyper-manufactured design with raw, painterly expressive details – reminding us of the human creative process behind each combined motif. Though the paintings and prints might refer to luxe items splashed throughout a contemporary music video, they are in fact part of a wider critique on how we consume visual items. Rather than simply employing elements of popular culture in ‘pop art’, Semple extracts, assimilates, deconstructs and refashions these images into works which endeavor to sit outside of popular culture. As such, as an artist he positions himself on the outside looking in.
Semple held his first solo show in London in 2001 and in 2004 his fame rose meteorically after his controversial exhibition R.I.P. YBAs. The show included a work which utilised debris from the Momart art fire, including burnt fragments from Tracey Emin’s infamous tent, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With. Semple generated headlines again in 2005 when he secretly installed an artwork at the Saatchi Gallery, entitled British Painting Still Rocks. Semple has exhibited worldwide in both solo and group exhibitions. He has also featured in several biennales and has curated group shows internationally.
