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Private View Tuesday July 17th 6-8pm
Bernard Jacobson Gallery is proud to announce its forthcoming exhibition of recent paintings by
Karl Hyde, the British artist and Underworld musician.
Although Hyde has often exhibited in museums and galleries internationally, this will be his first
exhibition of paintings in the UK and features the work that was shown at his first ever one-man
painting show at the La Foret Museum in Tokyo last year.
Hyde graduated from Cardiff Art College in 1978 having studied video, installation and
performance art. After leaving college he concentrated on immersive environmental works. In 1979
he formed Freur with Rick Smith and John Warwicker, the band that would soon become
Underworld, the acclaimed electronic dance-music group. Underworld are famed for their thrilling,
visually inventive stage shows as well as their soundtrack work with the film director Danny Boyle
on Trainspotting, the Olivier award nominated Frankenstein and the forthcoming Olympic
opening ceremony. In addition to the musical work, in 1991 Hyde joined with Rick Smith, John
Warwicker, Simon Taylor and others to form Tomato, a highly influential art and design collective.
Throughout the 90s and into the 21st Century Hyde has continued to make photo and text works
and produce visuals for the band’s stage performances and publicity material. 2007 saw the
formation of Art Jam, a loose, international, collaborative artist’s group made up of members of
Tomato, Underworld and friends. Their first work was a 10 x 50 metre live wall piece produced
over 16 hours at the Makuhari Messe, Tokyo and they continue to collaborate in a discursive “show
and tell”, their “Book of Jam”. In 2009 they brought the Jam to New York where their work was
shown at Jacobson Howard Gallery.
Hyde explains how he started producing his own paintings:
“When a translator was relating my answers to interviewers, I put a pencil and a piece of paper in my hands, and
what started to come out was the same marks I saw in my head while I was dancing with the group onstage. So I
thought, ‘Well, this is curious,’ and I just kept going on with it, really; developing it from there and working with
pieces of all sizes.”
Hyde’s large-scale paintings, diptych and triptychs, are entirely abstract gestural works, which have
an affinity to both abstract expressionism and Japanese calligraphy. Painted on paper or packing
cardboard with very large soft brushes and drawn into with charcoal and pastel, in some works one
single gesture runs the length of the surface, in others marks combine into something more
rhythmically complex. Hyde will often sit in front of the blank support, rehearsing the action he is
about to take in his head before he begins the work itself, in much the same way as he rehearses the
movements he will make across the stage during a performance. In the exhibition these paintings
will be accompanied by more intimate pencil drawings and scroll like works in pencil and gouache
on Japanese fold-out books, which describe driving through the chaotic urban environment of
cities such as Tokyo and Miami.
www.underworldlive.com
www.jacobsongallery.com
For further information, please contact Emma Doubt at emma@jacobsongallery.com or
Tel +44 (0)20 7734 3431.
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