Robert Holcombe: Telekinesis
Ghost Pornography & Fabricated Phenomena (1953 - 1980)
Private View
Saturday 13th May 2017
6-10pm
Then open by appointment until 28/5/17
Watch-it Gallery
t +44(0)208 530 7158
Robert Holcombe is an entirely fictional British
artist (b. Leeds 1923 – d. Exeter 2003) whose fascination with collage was
first discovered when he began cutting up magazines and rearranging the parts
whilst convalescing from injuries sustained in 1944, during active service in
Malaya. He was a radio engineer, a contemporary of Richard Hamilton at the
Slade School of Art and, from 1955 until 1988, a planning officer in Leeds. He maintained
a long correspondence with Eduardo Paolozzi, whose interest in elaborate
fictions and alternate realities he shared. Although Holcombe did not exhibit
publicly during his lifetime, he made most of his work under two pseudonyms –
Gene and Michael Harrison. It’s also notable that many of his images,
particularly those featuring material rooted in fashion, advertising and
technology, show a more ambiguous enthusiasm for the world of the Post-War era
than was usual at the time. His works are marked by a fascination with
consumerist excess, inscrutable apparitions of surgical, sexual and folkloric
symbols inside modernist interiors, and unsettling disturbances of ordinary
space.
