Super Dakota

Super Dakota is pleased to announce Alles Klar, Alex Clarke’s third exhibition at the gallery.

Incorporating painting, photographic works, text pieces and installation, Alles Klar places a sharp focus onto the network of relationships around not only the artwork but also practices of making and dissemination.

Clarke identifies that the very reason to want to make an artwork at all can be framed by the desire to talk to one another- that both artwork and practice act as placeholders and expanded gestures of discussion or exchange. To load this most basic social mechanism with such primary value positions Clarke’s work in a vital space beyond abstraction and into real-life moments of encounter, regaining an intimacy to connection and connectivity.

Merging art & life, the relationships which anchor this entire practice are personal and personified. Historical or cultural contexts are treated like interpersonal social dynamics equal to conversations between friends, notes, text messages, the margins of borrowed books, which all become something Clarke refers to as ‘inhabited research’.

These macro-narratives are collected and re-formulated generating text, language and thoughts which are moved through various forms and material outcomes freely. Songs of Songs for example is an ongoing group of works of lyric-like texts which exist, so far, as paintings, photocopies, t-shirts and variable vinyl installations.

Clarke’s hybridities between writing and making activates more open and generous spaces between author and artwork, artwork and viewer, viewer and author. Works such as the I’ll paintings evade painting’s usual past-as-default registers of time and tense, instead presenting a speculative painting of intention or a promise.

Whether personal, professional, academic, intellectual or fictional, the textual modes of this practice pronounce relationships through the narrativisation of moments of exchange, encounter, psychologies, criticality, belief systems, attitude, self, feeling, love, hate etc.
In Alles Klar experience, talking to one another and being together are slowed and poeticised- social networks past, present and future become embodied, human and real.

Alex Clarke – born in 1988, lives and works in London. He holds a BA from Central Saint
Martins, London and a post-graduate diploma from The Royal Academy Schools in London. Clarke has made solo and duo presentations at Independent, Brussels; Super Dakota, Brussels; Nicelle Beauchene, NY (with Ellen Macdonald); Paul Rogers, NY (with Jean Pierre-Pincemin, curated by Alex Bacon); Evelyn Yard, London, Gowlett Peaks (curated by Elinor Morgan).
Clarke also co-conceived How to be being at Super Dakota in 2017.
Since 2015 he has been an Associate Lecturer at Central Saint Martins, London. He also, with artists Ariane Schick and Daniel Lipp, initiated Hope Sandoval, an intermittent exhibition space and platform.