Vernisáž výstavy Tin Savage

Do soboty 19. 8. 2023 je v knihkupectví Xao, Krymská 29, Praha 10, přístupná velmi zajímavá a řachácká výstava Tina Savage.

Tin Savage (b.1992, Homerton) is an artist living and working in London, responsible largely for the aesthetic output of UK hardcore punk in the 2010s and 20s. His work can be seen internationally on record covers, t-shirts and posters for La Vida Es Un Mus, Static Shock Records, Lockin’ Out, 11pm and countless bands, shows and tours – most often working with marker pens, pencils, paper and a photocopier. His zines are most often self-published, selling out immediately with no re-prints and act as collections of sketches, commissions and assorted works on paper.

Although Savage’s work is best know in a commercial context, his practice informs all commissioned artwork, moving a cast of characters taken from pop-culture, punk folklore, tattooing and the artist’s imagination, defining a visual landscape for contemporary hardcore punk to exist within.
Born and bred in London, Savage brings a fantastical vision of the city’s underbelly to his work. Existing outside of any specific time period, his characters draw inspiration from the classic vision of an east end gangster as much as they do an eighties punk, or something else in an apocalyptic future. They’re bulbous, rounded and rendered in high contrast, the dot-shading creating harsh, stark depth in the image – avoidant of any light source or structure. The purpose of these figures is to intimidate, intrigue, to draw the viewer into the world they might inhabit.

Tin Savage is the first time that his illustration and painting have been collected in one place, acting as a point of entry into the world that his characters inhabit. The larger paintings in the exhibition are all works on canvas, made with a combination of house-paint and oil pastels, exploring the role of colour and texture in broader compositions. The paint is applied thickly in the background, drying with flat colour but an underlying texture to be brought out by the layers of pastel. In works like Betty Wears Boots (2022) Savage shows the beginnings of a more painterly approach to his work, exploring the visibility of brush strokes in the lining of the characters, with a rougher approach taken in the starbursts. All of the works on show here were produced using one size of brush, the result of a job-lot Ebay purchase, and it’s visible in the application of paint. Overloaded with emulsion, wiped clean and dragging through a thick underlayer, the brush is as much in conversation with the surface as the artist is with the image – works which initially wear their illustrative history on their sleeve give way to a subtle, painterly intent.