Richard Deacon and David Batchelor open exhibition to support Ukrainian Emergency Art Fund

2 February 2023

On 24 February, Handel Street Projects in London presents a collaborative exhibition of works by David Batchelor and Richard Deacon, with contributions from curator Fedja Klikovac, in support of the Ukrainian Emergency Art Fund.

On the exhibitoin, the artists wrote: "A month after the unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine, we had started a conversation about a possible collaborative project, knowing that both artists share a strong interest in colour. We didn’t know then that as a result of ‘two guys just noticing things as they go along who were sometimes worried and sometimes not but have a background preoccupation (as we all do)’, we would have collected a series of images containing the two colours of Ukraine’s flag (representing the country’s role as European breadbasket: blue denoting sky, yellow standing for the grain).

"Richard Deacon triggered this visual correspondence with an image and message: ‘nice coincidences from the studio window! Love to do something together’…. And images started flowing backwards and forwards, occasionally with a few words: ‘From a book about great Spanish anatomist and master of microscopy, Santiago Ramon y Caial, the names of the stain colours he used in his historical sections ‘dahlia violet, methylene green, hematoxin, eosin, black silver’; ‘Cafe at Hebden Bridge Station: badges for sale’; ‘Taken, incidentally, in the northern tip of the Lofoten Islands in Norway’; ‘Santa Maria Della Formosa’. And on it goes. Recently the Ukrainian curator Kateryna Iakovlenko spoke to art-agenda about an exhibition she organized in her ruined apartment, which had been hit by a Russian rocket. She explained its focus on everyday gestures of community and resistance as a strategy of studied “indifference” towards those responsible for the destruction of her home and the invasion of her country. Instead of expending her energy on thinking about the aggressor she prefers to “think about the future, about ordinary people experiencing all this with me.”"

All proceeds from the exhibition will go towards the Ukrainian Emergency Art Fund.

Find further information via Handel Street Projects.