Exhibitions

Damian Le Bas

May 19, 2018 - Oct 31, 2018
MAPS BY DAMIAN LE BAS

Opening: May 23, Wednesday, 18:00

“From being perceived as Tramps and Thieves with togetherness we can become the Kings & Queens of Gypsyland Europa. After all, wouldn’t Europe be a more boring place without us Gypsies?” (1st Roma Biennale)
Damian Le Bas was born in Sheffield U.K in 1963. He studied at the Royal College of Art London 1985-1987. He was one of the sixteen artists who were part of Paradise Lost The First Roma Pavilion Venice Biennale 2007. Together with his wife the artist Delaine Le Bas they created Safe European Home? a series of installations that have been seen across Europe since 2011. Gypsy Revolution and Gypsy DaDa were also two other artistic creations initiated by Damian. In the past years Damian has worked extensively with cartographies and maps. His works have been exhibited internationally since the late 1980’s including Prague Biennale 2005 & 2007, Venice Biennale 2007, The Third Edition Of The Project Biennale Art D-0 Ark Underground Bosnia & Herzegovina 2015, Goteborg International Biennale For Contemporary Art Extended 2015. Damian produced the artwork and paintings for Roma Armee at Gorki Berlin 2017 and was the initiator of The First Roma Biennale 2018. Damian died in early December 2017. (Curriculum)

“I’m literally putting Gypsies on the map,” Damian Le Bas would say of his cartographic representations of Europe as seen from a Roma perspective. One such work was Safe European Home1938 (2013), in which Le Bas redrew a map of Europe to include his trademark Gypsy portrait heads across every inch of the continent, their features marked by coastlines and rivers and borders, all interlocking, a repetition of eyes, eyelashes, noses and lips from the Baltic to the Balkans. At first it seems like witty pattern-making, until the viewer notices the somewhat more sinister text, “Gypsys Everywhere”, floating in the Mediterranean.
(from The Times Obituary

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