OPENING 9th JULY
Show runs till the
28th of August

 

Alex Binnie was born Alexander Michael Steven Binnie, on July 11, 1959, in Oxford, England. He is primarily known as a tattooist, and is also a printmaker; he has been a musician and performance artist.
As a tattoo artist he is known for being one of a group of artists who originated and popularized the use of large-scale tribal design (non-western, often Polynesian, and also involving elements of fusion across regional boundaries and traditions) in the West. His work reached a wide public with the publication of 1000 Tattoos by Henk Schiffmacher.

Artist's statement:
My work centers on and around the body. Intruiged by tattoos as a child, I became a tattoo artist as an adult. At art school in the 8o's my work was body orientated performance art, and I worked briefly as a medical illustrator before turning to tattooing. Over the last decade, while continuing to tattoo I have turned more and more to print, whilst continuing many of the themes that have fascinated me for decades.

Like tattooing, printmaking uses ink, and the woodcut, which I am curently primarily engaged in, also like tattooing accepts no prisoners in it's execution. Once a mark is made, it's made. The wood, or skin, is cut, and the ink makes it absolute. There are other paralells between the two; most Japanese tattoo imagery is derived from the woodcut, and the traditional wearers of the tattoo, the Yakuza, idealize themselves as contemporary warrior heroes as depicted in the classic Edo period prints.

Having tattooed others for 20 years or more, I have turned my art to face my previous subjects and collegues. These are my heroes. After a decade or so of producing complex colour silk screens, I wanted to strip it back to pure black ink and paper. A binary interpretation of reality, they restructure the face into a complex series of abstract marks, and in doing so question the nature and structure of the world we take for granted. These prints then work on 2 primary levels - they are a social document of some of the people surrounding me; and a contemporary exploration of a somewhat neglected medium.

Woodcuts £200 each in an edition of 50