2020: Urban Reckoning, Koppel Project Gallery

The Koppel Project is pleased to present Urban Reckoning: a show about urban living as a driving force in art. This group exhibition gathers together eight international artists working in response to the cities they inhabit. Through deeply personal and profoundly objective observation, the artworks in this show discuss the impact of artists' surroundings on their creative expression, through manipulating mediums as diverse as virtual reality, sculpture, painting, drawing, and video art. The work of Joonhong Min (London/Seoul), curator of Urban Reckoning, contemplates both the anxiety and creativity he derives from living in cities around the world. For him "the artists are observer, with the object of observation being suspended between the world and their personal life, expressing the unconsciousness of the individual through diverse mediums". Co-curator Sarah Lightman (London), whose art is about city and the self, recognises that as the exhibition opens during the pandemic it also explores: "our new fraught relationship with the city. We cannot be part of the outside world as we were before”. The other artists included in the show bring more and more layers to the reflective palimpsest of this mirror to the city. Christopher Farrell (London) works in a combination of virtual reality and painting. His art layers elements of urban architecture to create a futuristic and abstract rendering of urban space. David Blackmore’s (Dublin/London) art discusses consumerism and identity. His recent projects include scraping away the country emblem on his passport as way of answering the muddled question of nationality amidst growing immigration and globalisation.