David Batchelor

David Batchelor’s work is concerned above all things with colour, a sheer delight in the myriad brilliant hues of the urban environment and underlined by a critical concern with how we see and respond to colour in this advanced technological age. His studio is a treasure trove piled high with an endless variety of fluorescent plastic objects – clothes pegs, fly-swatters, buckets, spades, children’s toys, empty bottles of household products – found in pound shops and markets in cities the world over. He combines these everyday items with a range of light-industrial materials: steel shelving, commercial lightboxes, neon tubing, warehouse dollies, acrylics, plastics and so on to produce extraordinary installations which exalt the ordinary and celebrate the lurid and trashy whilst being, in themselves, often mesmerisingly beautiful.

Batchelor was born in Dundee in 1955 and lives and works in London. Recent exhibitions include: The Backlights, Galeria Leme, Sao Paulo (2008); The Color Chart, MoMA, New York; the 1st Folkstone Triennale (2008); Festival Remix, South Bank Centre, London, UK (2006-7), and Candela V & VI, Ingleby Gallery (off-site) Old Royal High School, Edinburgh (2006). In 2009 Batchelor was commissioned by the British Council to make a new installation, HK Fesdella, for the central pillar on the ground floor of their headquarters in Hong Kong. Most recently Batchelor was funded by the Arts Council England to make a 10 meter high light installation, Big Rock Candy Fountain, at Archway tube station in London. Batchelor is Senior Lecturer in Critical Theory at the Royal College of Art, London, and has written and edited a number of books, most recently Colour (2008, Whitechapel, London / MIT Press).

In Spring 2011, David Batchelor took part in the group show Gravity’s Rainbow – a exhibition exploring ‘found’ colour – at Ingleby Gallery.