Cullen Art Services - Location 1 with Martina von Meyenburg Oct 2009

The Islington Metal Works, London, 14 – 19 October

 

Zurich based and recently founded Cullen Art Services operates like a gallery but has no permanent exhibition space. Focusing on exhibiting its artists in different spaces, not necessarily associated with visual arts, CAS aims to open up new and exciting ways to look at and experience art. This also allows them to be flexible towards its exhibitions programme as well as any political, financial and environmental situation.
Additionally Cullen Art Services provides its artists with Residency opportunities in Scotland, Switzerland and East Timor - CAS believes that cultural exchange is most important for the artist's self-reassurance and the subsequent development of a career.

 

Other than being female and, coincidentally, with birth ties in Sweden, Swiss artist Martina von Meyenburg and Swedish artist Issa Salliander don’t have much in common except that looking at their work forces the viewer to think outside the box. The core of their work reveals associations with history and contemporary sentiment that translate globally.

 

Martina von Meyenburg presented a group of sculptures that seem to belong to a time long gone. Triggering all sorts of recollections, these memory-traced objects are full of fantasy and fairy tales, and have a very surreal aura to them. Looking at her artworks is like entering a “Wunderkammer”, but instead of celebrating worldliness, these objects question bourgeois values as much as any given standards.
Issa Salliander’s paintings come alive before the viewer. Using history of art as much as Rock ‘n’ Roll irreverence and contemporary politics, her work conveys tremendous physical involvement and is mesmerizing and repulsive at the same time. Citing phenomena and fascinations of extremes, Issa draws upon 20th Century independent films as much as the most obvious sexual references. 17th century Dutch still life painting meets Cézanne’s brushwork and the lyrics of Lynyrd Skynyrd.

 

Besides supporting artists directly the SCFB is of the opinion that it is equally important to support young and innovative ventures. Cullen Art Services presents a new way of promoting itself and the artists it looks after – it is in itself a “Gesamtkunstwerk” in that it seems to cover all relevant and important factors for a young talent to be able to survive and be successful in the art world of today.