May 4th 2013

Every print is both a multiple and unique in "Ask the dust", a typically witty, precise and surprising work by this 47-year old British artist. Here Adam Chodzko uses found 35mm slides, picked up in flea markets and on eBay, of environmental disasters. Like the subjects in these beautiful yet chance photographs, Chodzko's images have suffered their own wear and tear and are covered in their own dust, which echoes the debris blown around in his images of storms and quakes.

Now this scattering of speckles - which would normally be removed during the printing process - has become an integral part of the work, carefully captured in each print as a strangely alluring abstract pattern in the darkest of blacks, on top of these intensely physical images. Chodzko creates witty circles of meanings. Consider this: the images are accidental in so many ways - they show an accident, Adam found them by accident, and.... I leave the others for you to ponder with a wry smile on your face. What was once considered a mistake to be corrected has now become, in this context, the most logical addition to the art work - and that is the essence of a great 'Chodzko' to turn the world upside down or inside out and then make it appear like the most logical way to do things.

I first encountered Adam Chodzko 's work in the early eighties, when he spoofed and humanised the genre of the TV talent show, by staging his own 'God-look-alike contest'. Since then he has produced scores of powerful and timeless works that draw in performance, photography, conceptualism and the viewers. He's had solo shows at the Tate St Ives; his work has been exhibited at the Venice and Istanbul Biennale, Frieze Art Fair, and Royal Academy among other places; he is in the collection of the Tate and Saatchi; and he currently has an architecturally explosive installation at the Tate Britain. Chodzko is the secret star of the so-called YBAs, the Britart artists of the nineties, and his work will still be exhibited decades after the others are gathering their own dust in gallery storerooms. For my money, he should be filling the British pavilion at the Venice Biennale this year. Perhaps next time, then.

See the prints here.

Guest Curator

Ben Lewis is an award-winning documentary-film-maker and art critic. He has written for many leading British newspapers including the Financial Times, Telegraph, Observer, Die Welt and The Times, as well as international art journals. He wrote a monthly column on art for Prospect magazine 2004 - 2009 and was art critic for the Evening Standard 2007-2009, where he built a reputation for his lively and outspoken views.

Ben is probably best known however for “Art Safari”, his cult television series about contemporary artists which has been shown in the UK and all over Europe, and won a bronze at the New York Television Awards as well as the Grimme Prize in Germany in 2007. He is also known for his contributions to the BBC's Culture Show and for his fearless investigation of the contemporary art market in “The Great Contemporary Art Bubble” (2009), which was shown on the BBC and numerous other TV channels across the world, and screened at film festivals in Montreal, Vancouver, San Francisco, Tel Aviv, Copenhagen and Derry.