Jeremy Cooper and kennardphillipps

Jeremy Cooper and kennardphillipps

kennardphillipps, 'Study For a Head V' and 'Profit'

LEFT: kennardphillipps, Study For A Head V, 2012, pigment ink on FT newspaper, 58cm x 35cm
RIGHT: Profit, 2017, pigment ink and charcoal on FT newspaper, 58cm x 35cm

Private view: Friday 1 March 6 - 9pm
2-30 March 2019

In March 2019 writer Jeremy Cooper will be exhibiting his collection of mint commercial postcards in a specially designed installation at Danielle Arnaud Gallery, in parallel with an exhibition of his artists’ postcards collection at the British Museum.

Over the last six years Jeremy Cooper has made twelve composite postcard installations in his favourite London cafés, from Mario's in Kentish Town to Deli X in Deptford. This show at Danielle Arnaud is the grand finale, using most of Cooper's four thousand different mint commercial postcards across the entire ground floor of the gallery.

Cooper, a lifelong buyer and sender of postcards, started his collection in the early 1980s. He missed the postcards he had sent to friends and decided to keep a spare copy of every postcard he bought. Over the years the stack of saved cards mounted, sorted one day into categories. The collection today encompasses a range of subject areas from geometric patterns to celebrities, shoes, country churches, toys, aerial landscapes, writers, shells and bridges. It is governed by Cooper’s personal aesthetic preferences: mint condition, no lettering on the front, largely bled images, no postcards of art except portraits and no animals.

The display will be accompanied by Storyboards for a Sicknote, a new installation by Peter Kennard and Cat Phillipps who work in partnership as kennardphillipps. The duo’s highly political work encompasses photomontage, prints, paintings and mixed media installations, and their political portrait postcards are part of Cooper’s artist’s postcards collection. At Danielle Arnaud, kennardphillipps will present a past future vision of policies, attitudes and ignorances that have led the UK into the disintegrated state of pre-Brexit Britain. No longer 'Great' in name or anything else the artists re-spin the spin, reimagine the imagined 'Greatness' of a deluded nationalist spirit.

The exhibition is one of four artists’ postcard presentations that Cooper is curating in 2019, including The World Exists To Be Put On A Postcard at the British Museum (7 February-4 August), Id for Abroad at Tintype Gallery, London (7 March-6 April) and Political Postcards of the 1980s and 1990s at Bookartbookshop, London (8-30 March).

Jeremy Cooper is an established author who has written widely on art and antiques. He has appeared as an expert on the BBC’s ‘Antiques Roadshow’ and was co-presenter of BBC Radio 4’s ‘The Week’s Antiques’. He is the 2018 recipient of the Fitzcarraldo Editions Novel Prize for Ash before Oak, to be launched by Fitzcarraldo at the Danielle Arnaud Gallery on 3 April, the final day of the exhibition.

kennardphillipps is a collaboration between Peter Kennard and Cat Phillipps working since 2002 to produce art in response to the invasion of Iraq. It has evolved to confront power and war across the globe. The work is made for the street, the gallery, the web, newspapers & magazines, and to lead workshops that develop peoples’ skills and help them express their thoughts on what’s happening in the world through visual means. The work is made as a critical tool that connects to international movements for social and political change.

Jeremy Cooper and Andy Davey,'Obsession Parade', 2019. Photograph by Oskar Proctor

Jeremy Cooper and Andy Davey Obsession Parade 2019 ~2500 mint commercial postcards dimensions variable
Installation view by Oskar Proctor

Jeremy Cooper and Andy Davey Obsession Parade 2019 ~2500 mint commercial postcards
dimensions variable Installation view by Oskar Proctor

Jeremy Cooper and Andy Davey Obsession Parade 2019 ~2500 mint commercial postcards dimensions variable
Installation view by Oskar Proctor

Jeremy Cooper and Andy Davey Obsession Parade 2019 ~2500 mint commercial postcards
dimensions variable Installation view by Oskar Proctor

Jeremy Cooper and Andy Davey Obsession Parade 2019 ~2500 mint commercial postcards dimensions variable
Installation view by Oskar Proctor

Jeremy Cooper and Andy Davey Obsession Parade 2019 ~2500 mint commercial postcards
dimensions variable Installation view by Oskar Proctor

Jeremy Cooper and Andy Davey Obsession Parade 2019 ~2500 mint commercial postcards dimensions variable
Installation view by Oskar Proctor

Jeremy Cooper and Andy Davey Obsession Parade 2019 ~2500 mint commercial postcards
dimensions variable Installation view by Oskar Proctor

kennardphillips, Storyboard for a Sicknote, 2019.. Photograph by Oskar Proctor

kennardphillipps Storyboard for a Sicknote 2019 Installation view by Oskar Proctor

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