Abstract

First solo exhibition at Workplace Gallery. Exhibition included two video works from 1994, 'Sausage' and 'Two Sausages', a photographic work 'Two Bobs' 2008, and a large sculpture/construction combining white and wood grain melamine with a circle of frankfurters 2008. "New Modernism meets melamine and sausages in a new work by Eric Bainbridge for his first solo exhibition at Workplace Gallery. Postwurstendung conflates Bainbridge's ongoing reappraisal of Modernist sculptural principles with arguably the ultimate reductive minimal object - The Frankfurter. Bainbridge's elegant and refined white melamine construction nods toward the ideologies of a Northern European modernism. Heroic and thus ripe for reconsideration, this authoritative formalism is pushed into a problematic relationship with the sausages that surround it, posing a series of meaty questions: - are they surrogates for figures that inhabit the throwaway produce of post-war western capitalism (America and Germany embodied as Hot Dog)? - corpses from a sinister excess of radical ideals evidenced in the structure they adorn? - or simply redundant and dismembered bodies? Postwurstendung is a beautiful yet darkly comic and surreal sculpture, made and exhibited for the first time In Workplace Gallery's new space at The Old Post Office in Gateshead Town Centre."