The Preceding Cart and Pov: You Are Beans: Dickon Drury

Kendall Koppe and Seventeen are pleased to announce Dickon Drury's third and first solo exhibition with the galleries respectively.

 

The two exhibitions, The Preceding Cart and POV: You are Beans exist as two distinct bodies of new work, exhibited concurrently. In the spirit of exchange, collaboration and expanded dialogue between galleries and artists - the exhibition takes place at Seventeen, London.

 

 

Using unconventional framing devices and complex compositional decision-making, Drury is going through the gears with this group of new paintings. In reference to John Kelsey's idea of 'painting in reverse', the exhibition title alludes to the idiom 'cart before the horse', and invites us to reflect on the process of doing things counter-intuitively, or simply in the wrong order. Ropes, strings and nets, knit themselves throughout this group of paintings. These act as visual stumbling blocks which serve to disjoint the images, slowing both the painter and the viewer's progress.

 

The work Understanding Intervals (2025) presents the viewer with a grand, golden harp, its vertical strings slice through the sunlit garden room beyond. Partially obfuscated by the strings, we come to realise that the background is constructed in the strips of space between the notes. The strings themselves are formed of negative space. The room is populated with a myriad of pots, empty of plants but full of void-like soil. The subject of this painting isn't only the harp, or maybe not the harp at all, but rather, empty space and the function it serves within painting.

 

Drury often employs flatness and awkward perspectives in his paintings. In Preparing to Fail (2025) a grid of carefully positioned supplies are arranged on a terrazzo floor, some standing upright, some laid out as if seen from above. The image of a rudimentary trap occupies the centre of the painting. Referencing Pieter Brueghel's Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap (1565) and echoing an arduous past, the snowy scene points us towards a potential future that is being prepared for. Coupled with Drury's assortment of supplies we may consider our own preoccupation with preparation.

 

 

This second exhibition can be seen as a contemporary iteration of 'kitchen sink' painting described by David Sylvester in 1954 as including 'everything but the kitchen sink - the kitchen sink too.' Drury implements the strategy of the point of view meme, where a first person camera position allows a video to show a given situation from the viewer's perspective. Here the screen of the microwave replaces the screen of the phone, framing the kitchen interior which is also partially disrupted by the familiar grid of dots across the glass. Through our recasting as inanimate foodstuff Drury connects to the idea that a solution to contemporary existential anxieties can be found through greater objectivity. Perhaps from the revolving perspective of the beans in our microwave we find relief in the certainty of that objectivity.

 

POV: You are Beans
POV: You are Peas
POV: You are Macaroni Cheese
POV: You are Popcorn
POV: You are Potato
POV: You are Tomato Soup
POV: You are Egg Fried Rice
POV: You are Porridge
POV: You are Spaghetti Hoops

 

Dickon Drury (b. 1986, Salisbury) lives and works in Cornwall. He is a graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art and a recipient of the Slade School of Fine Art, Desiree Painting Prize (2016).

Recent solo exhibitions include: An Egg In Your Shoe at  Shulamit Nazarian , Los Angeles (2023); If you see me, then weep Galleri Opdahl, Stavanger, Norway (2023); Time Flies Like an Arrow, Fruit Flies Like a Banana at Kendall Koppe, Glasgow (2021); Dickon Drury, Condo London, Koppe Astner at Carlos/Ishikawa, London (2020); To Be The Key, Galleri Opdhal, Stavanger (2019);  Tennis Elbow, The Journal Gallery, New York (2018); Holed Up, Galleri Opdhal, Stavanger (2018); If The Sea Was Whiskey, Frutta Gallery, Rome (2017); The Who's Who of Whos, Koppe Astner, Glasgow (2016); Optics Don't Make Marks, Spike Island Project Space, Bristol (2008)

Selected group exhibitions include: BLUNK, Stavanger Kunstmuseum, Stavanger (2023);  Midnight Murmurs, Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles (2022); My Kid Could've Done That!, The Edge, Bath (2021); Generation Y, Platform Foundation, London (2019).