The Czech Magnate, a circular

For Actually Energy Help Light, David Egan presented several different bodies of paintings and text. A new work was painted using pigment from the beautiful yet noxious flowering plant Morning Glory, a climbing weed that competes with cultivated plants by growing laterally, stopping light from penetrating its blanketing surface. This painting changes colour in time, it is a pictorial registration of the decomposing plant matter. Other paintings extend Egan's Painting Playing Cards series (2013–), which invoke a form of decorative artifice introduced to the back of the formerly blank playing card in the nineteenth century to address a social epidemic of card cheating. Asparation Frieze produces a painting of architectural proportions, which cannot be viewed in its entirety from any one vantage, always gesturing to the peripheral. Egan’s written text works produce a meta-fictional space in which the concerns of the paintings criss-cross in a succession of mental images.

'The Czech Magnate, a circular', a radio play written by Mark von Schlegell ‘in the service of David Egan’, was produced especially for the occasion of this exhibition. It was performed and recorded live in the central gallery at Gertrude Contemporary on the evening of Tuesday 10 March 2015.

Listen Here.