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.
The Preceding Cart
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 Trap (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.
