Delaine Le Bas:
Zigeuner Sauce
7th October – 9th December 2021
Finissage
9 December 6pm-9pm
Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix is pleased to announce ‘Zigeuner Sauce’ of Delaine Le Bas. The second solo show of the UK artist at the gallery is curated by Christine Eyene, an independent curator.
This exhibition presents new works materialising entries from the artist’s journals, personal thoughts, and critical views on the politics that have contributed to exacerbate the societal unease affecting Britain today.
In the opening evening of 7 October, Le Bas will activate the gallery with a new performance beginning 7:30pm.
About the exhibition
Taking the news as source of information, Le Bas transposes the newspaper format to her creative practice, laying it on the gallery’s ground floor to convey the pervasive flux of information in everyday life, the speed at which news circulate, leaving little scope for critical distance, and how it eventually vanishes from our memory.
Media manipulation is also addressed through new ‘minimalist’ paintings in which words become sole pictorial elements. One of them, 'Beware of Linguistic Engineering' (2021), adequately translates how language is used by the powers that be, to influence collective thinking, but also blur meaning, understanding and interpretation. For this new display, Le Bas is taking over the gallery, transforming the ground floor walls into a massive canvas, with the insertion of paintings and other materials creating a form of mise-en-abyme.
In the Zigeuner Sauce series (2017-21), Delaine Le Bas also proposes to reflect on identity and self-naming. Indeed, while ‘Zigeuner’ – German term for Gypsy – has been called out for being considered offensive and discriminatory by members of the Romani and Sinti communities, in Britain, the word Gypsy is part of a self-identifying position.
A British Romany Gypsy artist, Le Bas revisits the motif of the spicy sauce bottle, as a tool for protest, similar to a Molotov cocktail, in dialogue with artist Betye Saar’s Liberation of Aunt Jemima: Cocktail (1973), or as ‘Pissotovs’ filled with her own urine, in echo with the ‘Puputovs’ used during the 2017 Venezuelan protests.
Beyond identity, this exhibition is an opportunity for new explorations into the artist’s creative roots in textile and fashion. On this occasion the artist has created a limited edition of art objects and art as clothing under the label House of Le Bas – Gypsy Couture. These will be showcased at the gallery in November, during a public programme event that will include a newly commissioned sound piece by Justin Langlands.
Image: Alexander Christie
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Related Events
VIDEOS
- Delaine Le Bas 'Zigeuner Sauce'
5 minutes 17 secondsImage video for the exhibition ‘Zigeuner Sauce'
- Delaine Le Bas ‘Beware of Linguistic Engineering’ performance
6 minutes 55 secondsA short video of the performance enacted on the opening date for the exhibition ‘Zigeuner Sauce’
- Delaine Le Bas in Conversation with Christine Eyene
56 minutes 58 secondsLe Bas and Eyene discuss the exhibition ‘Zigeuner Sauce', with reference to how her practice has developed over the years to come to the current stage.
- Delaine Le Bas performance ‘The House of Le Bas presents : Beware of Linguistic Engineering’
14 minutes 37 secondsVideo of the second and the last performance for Le Bas’s solo exhibition ‘Zigeuner Sauce.’
With Hugo S. Santos and sound pieces by Justin Langlands.
Video by thevideoproducers.co.uk