Ana Cristea Gallery is delighted to present a two-person exhibition featuring the work of London-based Chris Jones and Amsterdam-based Fendry Ekel. Both artists exploit seemingly banal imagery to unexpected ends: Jones uses paper ephemera to create beautifully-crafted, sculptural meditations on the passage of time, while Ekel appropriates familiar and even iconic imagery to produce mixed-media paintings with surprisingly complex, multi-layered content.

Ekel continues to mine his own personal history as well as to explore the shared context created by our wider ‘world’ history. _ Witness #3 _ depicts a cockatoo, an ‘exotic’ bird at home in (amongst other places) Indonesia, the artist’s country of birth. Placing his cockatoo within a grid reminiscent of the modernist Dutch painter Mondrian, Ekel assembles an image that speaks to the relationship between the colonized and the colonizer, the modern and the anti-modern. Ekel’s titles are integral to the meaning of his work—in _ Srebrenican Horse #2 _, “Srebrenican” alerts us to the fact that this seemingly straightforward image of a classic chess piece may in fact be a meditation on the idea of the ‘game’ of war.

Like Ekel, Jones uses appropriated imagery as a jumping-off point. The sculptural installation he has created for this show reflects his preoccupation with obsolescence and the absurdity of the ways in which we attempt to stave it off. Ephemeral media (old weekly magazines and outdated encyclopedias, for example) are used to build up a ‘rubbish pile’ dominated by a full-scale paper model of an archaic yet beloved form—a bulky, 1980s-era arcade game. Though Jones gives his obsolete materials new life, his reincarnation is one that feels as though something has gone (intentionally) awry, as formerly solid forms seem to collapse and decay before our very eyes.

Chris Jones (b. 1975, Preston, England) received his MFA from London’s Central Saint Martins. In 2009, he was one of two artists included in Galerie Martin Van Zomeren’s presentation at The Armory Show in New York. His work has been included in public exhibitions at the Museum Morsbroich (Germany), Teylers Museum (Netherlands), Islington Museum (UK), Birmingham Museum (UK), and HVCCA (USA). In addition, he has created commissioned work for Swarovski and Kenzo Paris and has been the recipient of the Kunming Red Mansion/Spero Art Prize and residency.

Fendry Ekel (b. 1971, Jakarta, Indonesia) migrated to the Netherlands-where he now lives and works-as a teenager. He studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. Ekel is a founding member of the Amsterdam-based artists’ collective OFFICE for Contemporary Art; the sculptor Folkert de Jong is also a member. His work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Erasmus Huis (Indonesia); HVCCA (USA), Museum Gouda (Netherlands) and the Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens (Belgium).