Charles Danby

Charles Danby is an artist, critical art writer and independent curator. He is currently writing about the inter-sensory and multi-sensory dynamics within the dematerialising spaces of contemporary painting practice.

He has held curatorial positions at Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium in Norway where he curated a partial-survey exhibition of contemporary British Art in 2010, and at Siobhan Davies Studios in London where he curated a site and off-site based exhibitions programme for the dance choreographer from 2009-12. He has held editorial positions at Tate Galleries where he edited the Tate Tanks Programme Notes in 2012 and the Tate Seasonal Guide in 2009, and for the London based art magazine Miser & Now where he was the assistant editor from 2009-11.

Across my artmaking I often work collectively and collaboratively. With the artist Rob Smith (2012-23) and with the collective group NEUSCHLOSS (2014-ongoing). I am also a member of the Collaborative and Curatorial Practice Research Group at Northumbria.

Within my artmaking I work across fields of painting, photography, film and construction with approaches rooted in materials, language, archives, event structures, and curatorial approaches of distributed and multi-form exhibition-making. I work with frameworks of geomateriality, deep-time, ecology, environment (space, site, situation, architectural forms), digital technologies and post-industrial-use sites. Works take forms as apparatus, social architectures, open archives, installations, exhibitions, events. Artworks are often bulky, multi-form and materially distributed. Selected recent exhibitions include Polymorphic Carbon Library, The Common Room, Newcastle (2021), Incidental Breather, Clore Studio, South London Gallery (2019), Limelight, Cardiff Contemporary (2016) with artist Rob Smith, Occasional Geometries, Longside Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2017) group exhibition curated by Rana Begum, and Cleaved Into, LU Arts, Loughborough University (2022), Das Trãumen, Baltic (2015) with NEUSCHLOSS.

Through writing I am examining the inter-sensory and multi-sensory dynamics within the dematerialising spaces of contemporary painting practice. I am particularly interested in the expansions of digital and immersive digital technologies and their entwining into the spaces of evolving painting practice through production, discourse and output forms. This evaluation is also situated within the emergence of experimental film practices from painting practices in Britain through the expanded cinema of the 1960s/70s, and the wider emergence of new generational experiential moving image practices, connective to expanded cinema and to painting, in the mid 2000s. It builds on the chapter Interspecies Cyborgs: Edges of Contemporary Painting (2022) being published in the forthcoming Routledge edited collection Sensorial Modernities (2023).

Further critical art writing centres on monograph and exhibition catalogue essays, exhibition reviews and artist profiles and commentaries. I have written for art magazines including Frieze, Flash Art, Untitled, Contemporary and Art-Review, and cultural publications including I-D Magazine and Wonderland.

My curatorial work centres on permeable and distributing exhibition-making approaches, most readily through group contexts. I am interested in pluralising, parallel, and multi-form encounters. Situations of artworks and audiences. Work examines this through relational, collective, and temporary alignments (sited, off-sited and multi-sited) of artworks and audiences and extended output and experiential forms through channels of broadcast, events programming and printed matter. Curatorial works in this space include, Epilogues: It Started With A Car Crash, IMT Gallery & Slade Research Centre, London (2011), Animated Environments, Siobhan Davies Studios, Elephant & Castle, South London Gallery (2011-12) and Grand National - Art From Britain, Vestfossen, Kunstlabortaorium, Norway (2010). I am particularly interested in questions that prioritise and problematise relationships between artworks and audiences and the temporary and transitional environments in which they meet.