John Bunker

(a contemporary) phantasmagoria coming to Tension Fine Art in May!

We might understand the word ‘Phantasmagoria’ as conjuring up the magic-lantern shows of darkened eighteenth-century drawing rooms; or, in its more recent incarnation, as Walter Benjamin’s term for the fractured, kaleidoscopic nature of the experience of modernity. This show, ‘Phantasmagoria’, looks to enlarge the scope of Benjamin’s definition, the better to take the measure of our fragmentary, collagic, screen-mediated contemporary reality.

Here, painting and sculpture are invested with a startling and raucous materiality, twinned with meticulous craftsmanship. Collage and abstraction are used to open up or pulverise both picture plane and sculptural object, rendering them as sites of complex disruptions, antagonisms and mutations formed from disparate ideas from the history of art and the (de)materiality of the life we are living now. Delicate, fragile, improvisatory processes that harness painting’s polarities, chaos and control, in figurative, narrative terms, celebrate, visual storytelling and the power of illusion.

‘Phantasmagoria’ reflects ironically on the sense of loss, frailty and failure by which our era, the ‘High Anthropocene’, might one day come to be defined; but it also seeks to show how current artistic practice channels the multifarious, ineffable ways in which a contemporary phantasmagoria can act upon us, thereby becoming a catalyst for change.

Between Rainstorms series 2023

Taking its name from the old English term for the most basic form of human transportation when all others have failed- walking- Bunker’s new show presents visually complex and dynamic abstractions born of the most modest of means and materials.

These works are meticulously constructed from the flotsam and jetsam of city streets and charity shops. Pizza boxes are transformed into charged and compelling sculptures; the contents of old picture frames- their window mounts and backing boards, and the images they enclose- are colonised and repurposed into a rich, ludic, abstract language all their own.

Bunker explores the fragmentary and collagic nature of contemporary reality; yet, in doing so, invokes both a bygone analogue world of suggestive abstract shapes conjured from the phantasmagoric transformations of obsolete, lowly materials, objects, and images, and the outmoded artistic ideals that underpinned it. 

Just as Walter Benjamin, in his ‘Arcades Project’, looked back on 19th-century Paris to understand the momentous changes wrought by Capitalism, Bunker looks back to the convulsive transformations of 20th-century art and culture, the better to understand our contemporary condition. It is, perhaps, Benjamin’s invocation of the 'Angel of History’ that feels most pertinent to Bunker’s collagic enterprise:

“The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. ”

Shanks’ Pony PV Sat 11th Nov, 2 till 5pm.

Shanks’ Pony runs from 12th Nov till 21st Nov by appointment.

Shanks’ Pony is open on Sat 18th Nov, 2 till 5pm.

Whilst working on a house in Edinburgh in 1887, two itinerant labourers placed a message inside a whisky bottle and hid it under the floorboards. Bottle and contents have only now come to light; and John Bunker’s survey show at Tension Fine Art, ‘Our Dust is Blowing Along the Road’ derives its title from one of the message’s most memorable fragments. 

Bunker has this to say: “What struck me about this particular story was that the bottle was hidden in a house, rather than cast out to sea, and so long ago. I’d been thinking about putting together a survey show of my work for quite a while; and it occurred to me that, just like the bottle in this story, artworks get hidden away for years and then are rediscovered by the artist or curators. I liked the quiet poetry of those men’s words. They got me thinking: what messages from the past do artworks hold within the fabric of their peculiar singularity? How do they speak to us in the present tense and what might the future hold for them? Even an artwork I finished last week is already history!”

Bunker’s work is characterised by an obsession with those twin disruptors born of Modernism, abstraction and collage, and their continuing powerful presence in contemporary art.

Abstraction is often associated with high ideals, formal innovation and a preoccupation with purely aesthetic experience. Collage is, by contrast, the stuff of gritty satire, stark juxtapositions of imagery and the quotidian world of objects and images.

Bunker plays with the friction generated between these two modes, creating images and objects that are both allusive and elusive. Swinging from the delicate and poetic to the materially dense and brutal, the array of sculptures, paintings and wall-based assemblages on show- all of them made within the last decade– offer tangible proof of Bunker’s ability to conjure captivating and psychologically charged abstract images from a startling and diverse range of materials.

Bunker’s work is characterised by an obsession with those twin disruptors born of Modernism, abstraction and collage, and their continuing powerful presence in contemporary art.

Abstraction is often associated with high ideals, formal innovation and a preoccupation with purely aesthetic experience. Collage is, by contrast, the stuff of gritty satire, stark juxtapositions of imagery and the quotidian world of objects and images.

Bunker plays with the friction generated between these two modes, creating images and objects that are both allusive and elusive. Swinging from the delicate and poetic to the materially dense and brutal, the array of sculptures, paintings and wall-based assemblages on show- all of them made within the last decade– offer tangible proof of Bunker’s ability to conjure captivating and psychologically charged abstract images from a startling and diverse range of materials.

Whilst working on a house in Edinburgh in 1887, two itinerant labourers placed a message inside a whisky bottle and hid it under the floorboards. Bottle and contents have only now come to light; and John Bunker’s survey show at Tension Fine Art, ‘Our Dust is Blowing Along the Road’ derives its title from one of the message’s most memorable fragments. 

Bunker has this to say: “What struck me about this particular story was that the bottle was hidden in a house, rather than cast out to sea, and so long ago. I’d been thinking about putting together a survey show of my work for quite a while; and it occurred to me that, just like the bottle in this story, artworks get hidden away for years and then are rediscovered by the artist or curators. I liked the quiet poetry of those men’s words. They got me thinking: what messages from the past do artworks hold within the fabric of their peculiar singularity? How do they speak to us in the present tense and what might the future hold for them? Even an artwork I finished last week is already history!”

John Bunker was born in Norwich in the UK in 1968. He received BA Hons Degree in Art & Social Context from Dartington College of Arts, Devon in 1991. Since moving to London in 1996, Bunker has worked in various arts settings including community arts and Further and Higher Education. As well as maintaining his multi- disciplinary arts practise, Bunker also regularly curates exhibitions which have included artists as diverse as Sir Frank Bowling OBE RA and Harland Miller. He also writes regularly about art. Bunker has written numerous reviews, catalogue essays and articles and in 2018 co-founded instantloveland.com with Matt Dennis, a website dedicated to exploring the histories and potential futures of abstract art. Bunker has exhibited widely in the UK and abroad and has works in many private collections.

Sculpture 2022

Sculpture 2022

In the studio…

Sneak peek of preparations for Hammer N’ Tongs landing soon at Unit 3, London.