It's Not the Heat, It's the Dust — GROVE London + Berlin

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It’s Not the Heat, It’s the Dust
A Group Exhibition featuring Maja Klaassens, Johannes Unger, Hadrien du Roy, Ángela Jiménez Durán, Blerta Hashani, Bryan Ali Sanchez,
Lászlo von Dohnanyi, Anna Raczyńska, Jason Birmingham, Carolyn Forrester, and Jake Sheiner
22/04/23 - 27/05/23
GROVE Battersea
9B Battersea Sq., SW11 3RA, London, UK

Opening: Saturday, April 22nd, 6-9 pm
9B Battersea Sq., SW11 3RA, London, UK

GROVE is pleased to present the upcoming exhibition It’s Not the Heat, It’s the Dust, a group exhibition featuring Maja Klaassens, Johannes Unger, Hadrien du Roy, Ángela Jiménez Durán, Blerta Hashani, Bryan Ali Sanchez, Lászlo von Dohnanyi, Anna Raczyńska, Jason Birmingham, Carolyn Forrester, and Jake Sheiner, on view at GROVE’s Battersea location from Saturday, April 22nd to Saturday, May 27th, 2023. This is the first time the gallery has worked with all of the exhibition’s artists.

The foundation of It’s Not the Heat, It’s the Dust lies in a dissatisfaction with landscapes and exteriors being mined primarily for their aesthetic qualities. Of course, there is a purely visual pleasure to “nature’s bounty”; art as a means of escapism serves a purpose, and bucolic scenes often associated with landscape painting are not without their value. However, this exhibition seeks to reinvestigate “natural” (itself a contested term) terrains’ capacity to bear metaphor and metonym. As such, its goal is to open up discourses not only around our relationship to the natural world, but that which we consider natural, and the complex social and economic matrixes we become party to when those definitions are taken for granted.

Featuring eleven artists, It’s Not the Heat, It’s the Dust refuses a single lens, and instead invests in multiplicity. Within the grouping there are thematic overlaps and divergences; stylistic similarities and contrapositions. However, the result becomes kaleidoscopic: each artist, and thus each work, inflects the exhibition and a new and exciting way. Whether that be through the pointed and comic sculpture of Anna Raczyńska, the thematically and visually dense work of Carolyn Forrester, to the visually astounding work of Ángela Jiménez Durán, each artist provides an inroad to the theme at hand, always inviting a new mode of meaning-making from the viewer.

For GROVE, It’s Not the Heat, It’s the Dust looks to draw linkages between the gallery’s London and Berlin programs. Six of the exhibition’s eleven artists are Europe-based, with curation being done across the gallery’s three directors; while a markedly “London” show, It’s Not the Heat, It’s the Dust creates consistency across spaces and audiences.