21st April 2010 – 28th February 2011

Initial Access is delighted to present ATTITUDE. Curated by David Thorp, the eighth exhibition at Initial Access will feature a selection of painting and sculpture by Dan Colen, Gerald Davis, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Matt Greene, Dirk Skreber and Banks Violette drawn from the Frank Cohen Collection.

ATTITUDE is an exhibition of work by artists whose approach might be considered anti-social or to support positions that fly in the face of conventional morality and good taste.

There has always been an iconoclastic element in contemporary art. Each generation challenges its predecessor as it adopts new attitudes and makes art based on ideas in changing artistic and social contexts. Some of the great movements of the past 100 years such as Dada and Surrealism have confronted taboos and opened up new areas of activity as legitimate territory for artists.

The exhibition will include Banks Violette’s installation Untitled (Church), a monumental sculpture of the ruins of a church cast in salt. The work is based on imagery from an album cover commemorating a murder that took place in Norway as part of a bizarre event associated with a music subculture known as Black Metal. Dirk Skreber commemorates the banal; his paintings of lone train carriages, road accidents and disaster sites record incidents of beauty and horror. Dan Colen reflects on subcultural language. Gerald Davis muses on Kurt Cobain’s suicide and teenage lust. Gardar Eide Einarsson’s legacy stems from pop art, punk and agitprop using visual imagery borrowed from underground subcultures including the criminal world, left-wing militias as well as various forms of social transgression and arguments for political subversion.