Colour within the urban environment...

Artist David Batchelor leads a vibrant visual event at the HOUSE Festival 2012 across Brighton & Hove for the Brighton Festival (May 5-27).

David, along with Tim Brown & Anna Deamer, Robin Blackledge, Deb Bowness, Caroline Le Breton and Helene Karzan, set out to alter Brighton’s artistic landscape in its annual visual art festival.

Artwork will be positioned in independent galleries, domestic spaces, artist studios and unexpected locations across Brighton & Hove, with David Batchelor as lead artist.

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David is concerned with colour within the urban environment. For HOUSE 2012 he draws connections between Sicilian street festival decoration and the vernacular of Brighton’s celebrated Regency architecture.

His latest site specific installation, drawing on traditional festival decorations encountered in Palermo, will be presented at Hove’s Regency Town House – a grade 1 listed terraced

house undergoing major restoration. Palermo Remix makes a point of connection between the artist’s current fascination with festival illumination and the building’s architectural period details, where Regency details feature in decorative motifs. It also plays on the idea of the public and domestic, the familiar and overlooked and touches on the famed hedonism of the city’s Regency past.

“It’s a rather beautiful building that is an architectural research centre for that Regency area,” David said. “It’s one of those buildings where they put everything back to its original state. That happens quite often. The space of the building and some of the colours of the building, particularly some fan lights above the doorway, have triggered certain ideas for me.

“There was also a link to certain ideas that I was already working on in the studio, and so it is about the differences and about the overlap.”

Admission free. Opening hours: Wednesday-Sunday, 12-6pm.

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