Double Vision: Paintings and books by Malcolm Green
Friday, November 16th, 6-8PM

Apart from an inordinate fondness of colour, most striking about Malcolm Green's paintings, prints and artists' books is his marriage of visual image and text. Already as a dancer and choreographer in the 1980s he used spoken texts on stage to keep the viewer from having to resort to the programme in order to discover what was going on; in much the same vein his paintings on metal from the mid-nineties on began by including the title - to obviate the need of looking at a sign on the wall to know what the work is about. But almost immediately the words and images became equals, not describing or illustrating one another, but mutually commenting on, punctuating, parenthesising each other in a mutual shadowplay to produce an ongoing ironic dialectic. And in his recent books, the texts have developed into prose poems and luminous treatises, while the visuals have extended into long suites - like portrait galleries of ideas whose eyes seem to move when you are not quite looking. BABS will feature around a dozen of Malcolm Green's paintings on metal from the late 20th to early 21st century, as well as some twenty artist's books with original artwork, including A Brief Introduction to Hegel, Googleface, The Invisible Hamlet, Noirs - Les fleurs du Malcolm, and most recently Double Visions.

Green has pursued various parallel careers, including ten years as a solo dancer, over twice as long as a publisher with Atlas Press and as a translator, and several sporadic decades as an artist. He has been shown in and curated numerous exhibitions in Europe, Asia and the US, including Lodz Biennale and recently Kling og Bang gallery in Reykjavik. He is spokesman of the Dieter Roth Academy and an associate member of the London Institute of 'Pataphysics.