The Toot Yung Art Center presents “Adaptation” a duo exhibition by resident artists, Lili Heller (French) and Ben Readman (Irish).

Co-founders of the much celebrated BLOCK T (the biggest non-for-profit and independent art and cultural centre in Dublin), Heller and Readman will exhibit for the first time as a duo in Bangkok. Adaptation will combine a selection previous works brought by the artists as well as new works produced during their residence in Bangkok.

Born in 1981 in France, Lili Heller is a professional Visual Artist based in Richmond Road Studios, Dublin. Since five years she has been involved as a Mediator and Organiser in an annual international artists exchange project of Block T. She is the Co-founder of LINK Culturefest and she is the Education Officer of BLOCK T and runs Skillsets, the creative Education Department. She obtained her Visual Arts Masters in 2004 in the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Marseille, France. In 2005, she then received a Masters of Theoretical Art Studies from the Université de Provence, France. Since 2002 she has had many solo exhibitions in France and Germany and has participated in numerous group shows in France, Canada, Slovenia, Ireland and China. Her artistic work is in numerous public and private collections in France, Austria, Germany, Ireland, Slovenia, Canada, Brazil, China, and Thailand.

Lili Heller's artworks are hard to categorize. They are neither figurative nor abstract; they sit in a rare place between imagination and reality, between spontaneity and control; she creates connections, tensions, fusions and resistance between man-made and natural elements. Her drawings and paintings become places of confrontations, meetings and associations;

Ben Readman is a Visual Artist and Artistic Director. He has exhibited in many countries worldwide and has completed artist residencies in Ireland, France, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia and China. In 2010 he won the Mourlot Prize for contemporary painting in Marseille, France, has been awarded funding from the Arts Council and Culture Ireland. His work is in many collections including the Office of Public Works, the Shelbourne Hotel, Lendava Castle, Mason Hayes & Curran, Deutsche Bank and Key Capital Investment. He is currently the Artistic and Marketing Director of BLOCK T, and a full member of the Visual Arts Centre. He has also previously held roles as secretary of the V.A.C. and Director of the Button Factory Studios.

Ben Readman's works engage with forms of actual, perceptual and imagined landscape. They are diverted realities that merge interpretations of natural phenomena, molecular structures and human physiology, incorporating diverse networks of ideas and subject observations. Ben Readman presents us with shards of shuffled truths that act as both ‘macrocosm and microcosm’, amalgams of image and technique that encourage a more protracted consideration of man’s contemporary scientific, philosophical and poetic relationship with the natural world.

-Toot Yung Art Center

Image: © Ben Readman
Volume
Oil on prepared linen on board
15 x 18.5cm