Steve Bishop

Steve Bishop

Work from “The Myth of Fingerprints“.

Steve Bishop‘s preferred working materials are found, ready-made objects and substances which already carry specific or unalterable characteristics, such as the mouthwash “Cool Mint” by the brand Listerine. Its luminous azure blue lends the appearance of a monochrome painting to his work “Φ”. However, in its immediate presence, the entire space is filled with the acrid and unavoidable smell of the mouthwash, countering the appearance of a painting with the realisation of what it is in the first place, namely mouthwash.

The work “Difference Between Mating Parts” also emphasises, by repositioning and de-contextualising, the idiosyncratic nature of its objects: two stool frames – machine-made things which should, theoretically, match each other perfectly – are synthesised into a new form. Their mutual confrontation is clearly intended by the artist to render visible the fact that they are, after all, not identical.

The title of the ongoing series “My Work Here is Done” formulates Bishop‘s approach in a kind of self-assessment that is amounting to an artistic programme. Thus the works have the last word when Bishop accommodates effects that emerge out of the works themselves and are not of his making: in the early textile works of the series, consisting of distorted tights stretched over objects, Bishop plays on the tension created by references to the human body. By contrast, the more recent works of the series address the dynamics of optical phenomena arising from materials such as glass and colour filter foil on account of their properties of transparency and reflection.” Galerie koal