Artists: Colin Darke & David Mabb

Commodity Form

14th March - 10th May 2008

Commodity Form was made up of two large-scale, over-lapping works by Colin Darke and David Mabb. This was the first time that the two had shown work together and the project was centred on their shared commitment to socialism and explored the commodification of the art object.

The Capital Paintings, a series of 480 paintings from Colin Darke, followed on from a previous work, Capital, which consisted of 480 found objects onto which had been transcribed the 3 volumes of Karl Marx's Das Kapital. The paintings did not contain the transcriptions, but used the depiction of the objects to question the means of production.

David Mabb's Rhythm 69 was a series of 70 paintings incorporating pages from a William Morris wallpaper pattern book and a series of images by Hans Richter that had been painted onto the pages of the pattern book. These images were from a storyboard from 1970 for a proposed animated film Rhythm 25 based on sketches by Kasimir Malevich, dating from 1927. The result was a dialectical exchange between Malevich's work as interpreted by Richter and Morris' utopian designs.