Art Projects at London Art Fair explores the impact of technology on our lives

Art Projects returns to the London Art Fair in January, offering a platform for emerging galleries to showcase contemporary art from across the globe.

Now in its 16th edition, it’ll bring together artists working across a broad range of mediums, including digital art, video, photography, textiles and painting.

So what can we expect? Cork Printmakers will exhibit work by a diverse group of artists, many of whom draw upon the cultural history which has shaped the Irish landscape. Highlights include Catherine Hehir and Noelle Noonan’s new series Brides of Print and Robyn Litchfield at Nunnery Gallery, who uses landscape painting to reflect on her own cultural heritage, drawing on archival material and personal documents relating to the early exploration and colonisation of her native country New Zealand.

Other works will explore our fragile relationship with the natural world. In her bright landscape paintings, Canadian artist Judith Berry at Art Mûr renders natural elements such as sticks, grass and vegetation to appear manufactured, posing the pressing question – what are the consequences of our interference with the natural world?

Anna Reading‘s sculptures presented by Standpoint Gallery are built using a range of found material – from shredded foam to oyster shells – bringing into question the relationship between organic and synthetic items, whilst Olivia Bax‘s large sculptural forms transform elements that are familiar, such as a handle or a pipe, into an unconventional form.

A solo exhibition of Tom Down by Mint Art Gallery will consider how the natural world has been idealised from the traditional Romantic landscape to today’s media. Taking visual clichés such as alpine vistas and forest idylls, he re-creates these scenes as maquettes using polystyrene, cardboard, glue and paint, before realistically rendering them in paint.

Elsewhere, some exhibitors will show artworks that look closely at mathematical and technological ideas. DAM Gallery will feature code-based art by a range of early pioneers and middle-generation digital artists, including Frieder Nake’s plotter drawings produced by an algorithm trained to draw lines at random, questioning the ‘clean’ digital aesthetic that dominates the world of technology.

In contrast, Eagle Gallery is presenting a more recent form of systems-based art with the work of Natalie Dower, a friend and colleague of many of the original British constructivist and systems painters of the 1950s and 60s. Her paintings and three-dimensional works, rooted in mathematical geometry, codes of proportion and colour theory, will be shown in counterpoint with works on paper by six contemporary artists responding to her work.

There is plenty more in store. Here’s a flavour of what’s to come. The London Art Fair runs from 22 until 26 January 2020 at Islington’s Business Design Centre.