Suspiria promises to be an exciting gallery experience as German artist Rudolf Reiber brings his artistic musings to PayneShurvell for his first solo London show. Designed to challenge what a gallery is, both physically and psychologically, Reiber intends to explore the ways in which spectators engage with artwork.

The gallery, which has been closed for a month to prepare to house this exhibition, has been succumb to vigorous preparations, as the centerpiece of the exhibition is a over-polished and resin-ed floor. The piece entitled ‘Losing Ground’ (2012) will be a focal point of the exhibition, but the viewer will not be allowed to touch or walk on it.

Inspired by codes and language systems such as Braille and sign language, Reiber’s work both invites communication and actively resists it. Other works that will feature include a 90-minute 3D Film that is a Braille translation of Ingmar Bergman’s 1963 film ‘The Silence’. The sign language influences can also be seen in ‘No Room for Interpretation’ (pictured).

There will be plenty to see as well as plenty withheld from sight. Likely to be an exploration of the senses Reiber’s Suspiria will be both eye-opening, and mind-opening as you will be unable to avoid reflecting on your own preconceived perceptions.

Rudolf Reiber was born in Frankfurt, Germany but is now based in London. He works with video installations, photography, paintings and sculptures. He has exhibited internationally and in 2011 he won the Salon Art Prize.

Engaging with construction, industrial design and function the three artists Inbal Strauss, Elaine Reynolds, and Rowena Hughes intend to highlight the ‘Folly’ behind functionality by exploring the notion of “functionless-ness” in construction.

Each artist’s work plays with the idea of pointless and unnecessary constructions. Elaine Reynolds’ work includes a screening of ‘On/Off States’ which captures landscapes in transition. Focusing on a rural area that has been subject to urban cultural intervention she highlights the altering functionality of landscapes.

Inbal Strauss focuses more in industrial design, looking at the superfluity of machines. Looking at machines developed by consumerism she imaginatively experiments with possible uses and the beauty of functionless design.

Meanwhile Rowena Hughes’ work will include prints which intend to highlight a struggle of control. Her chance compositions are designed to highlight the conflict of controlling faith and reason.

This exhibition begins the moment you enter as artist Ed Sanders has designed a wall mounted banner for the stairwell to the project space. Sanders works with shapes, patterns and geometric figuration, his work overlooks the Rigg Approach industrial estate further adding to the show’s exploration of functionality in construction.

A generation defining designer brings his selection of architecture to Chelsea Space. Max Clendinning is internationally renowned, born in 1924, the designer’s list of past clients boast those household names of Christian Dior and Liberty Co. His impressive repertoire of work and clients further add to the promise that this will be a ‘rare opportunity’ to see his work on display.

Having been compared to the Memphis design group and been labeled all things from ‘Postmodern’ to ‘Pop’, Clendinning’s exhibition will no doubt be a masterful pleasure. ‘Avant Craft’ will allow viewers the chance to see Clendinning’s interior design painted plywood furniture works.

Having recently featured in the Victoria & Albert Museums landmark exhibition British Design 1948 – 2012, Clendinning’s glossy bright coloured furniture’s are undoubtedly exquisitely made. Even though many of the designs were constructed in the 1960’s they are extremely rare and still showcase luxurious cutting-edge innovations in interior design.

The actual pieces in the exhibition will come from Max Clendinning’s private collection as well as former cult band Fad Gadget’s drummer Nick Cash’s own collection of Clendinning’s work. Cash has been a long time Clendinning enthusiast and began purchasing his works over 20 years ago. Some of the works that will be on display include painted plywood furniture, his papier maché lamp and a few abstract paintings. With their well-known ‘toy-like’ quality, Clendinning’s innovative designs are not to be missed.

Photographs – can you always trust them? Are they a truthful snapshot of reality, or merely a fabricated glimpse? Diane Arbus described a photograph as ‘a secret about a secret’ suggesting that ‘the more it tells you, the less you know’. A photograph with no description is open to misjudgment. When we look at a photograph can we truly believe that that is a true representation of reality or could it be fabricated evidence designed to deceive and exclude the truth.

This complex notion is explored in a group project on display at Tenderpixel. Entitled ‘I Love You’ the exhibition is designed to evoke a sense of subconscious awareness of artist motivations. Every single piece of photography is intended to contain an artistic statement and each piece of photography works around a boundary – that of the image as aesthetic and the image as an artistic statement.

The project encompasses a wide range of artistic talents boasting a collaboration between 5 artists: Grace Brown, Natasha Caruana, EJ Major, Pete McGovern, and Andre Penteado. Natasha Caruana is the founding director of London’s studioSTRIKE and also lectures at the University for the Creative Arts in Surrey. Meanwhile EJ Major is also a photography lecturer at Middlesex University, she has been establishing a name for herself on the UK Contemporary Art circuit, ‘I Love You’ will feature her series of images entitled ‘Marie Claire RIP’ (2011) which incorporates mug-shot images of a woman, gradually depicting her demise.

Each of the artists will be bringing their own focus and specialisms to the exhibition. Nineteen-year-old Grace Brown from Massachusetts specializes in using photography as a form of activism, while Pete McGovern uses photography to explore his transgender identity experimenting with transfigured landscapes and self-portraits. Sao Paulo born Andre Penteado is a freelance commercial and editorial photographer who developed his skills in one of Latin America’s largest publishing houses.

With such a diverse line-up of artists, this collaborative project promises to be a unique experience. The concepts of this exhibition are by far intriguing, and to help guide you through them, established exhibitioner and photographer, Richard Ansett will be curating the show. Whilst the title of ‘I love You’ may be a bit ambiguous to the concepts, it will no doubt be a thought-provoking and insightful view into the world of creative photography.

The gallery has been closed for a month while Reiber has been working on his site-specific piece, chipping away by hand dozens of layers of paint accumulated over 50 years in the former industrial unit that houses the gallery. The newly revealed floor has been polished dozens of times and then finally a protective resin has been applied. The work will be kept in this pristine condition for the length of Reiber’s show.

On display in the gallery will be a painting sealed in a packing crate that Reiber commissioned from his partner for the exhibition. The content of the painting is of a secret his partner has not shared with him. The gallery directors and any potential buyers will have to sign an agreement not to open the crate.

Reiber’s work addresses the idea of desire and denial, work that invites communion and engagement but is also actively resisting it. Reiber deals with the codification of language and with layers of meaning. He incorporates other codes and language systems (Braille, sign language) and also uses deceptively minimalistic means in his work, while subverting the conventions of minimalism to ironic effect.

Rudolf Reiber (b. Frankfurt 1974) apprenticed as a stone mason before studying fine art at the Academy in Stuttgart, Germany the Academy in Vilnius, Lithuania and at the Slade, London. His practice includes video, installation, photography, painting and sculpture. Reiber has exhibited internationally in Germany, France, Denmark, Turkey, Russia and the US.  Rudolf Reiber was the 2011 winner of the Salon Art Prize.

Part of British Design Season at the V&A

Often raw and rough, found remnants form a starting point, from which Ager’s process of recomposing and reinventing, results in a collection of works that reflect the artist’s attraction to the questions surrounding what makes an object – or a collage of objects – a sculpture. The defining of this function runs throughout the exhibition, which sits at an intersection between abject and functional, primitive and sophisticated, imperfect and slick.

The title work (Live Laugh Laugh, 2012) exemplifies how commercially manufactured objects, customarily purchased upon the appreciation of their images, can dictate an ideology of “personal” desires. By simple manipulation of these objects, the typical ideological association comes under scrutiny, physically the decorative wall pieces ‘Live Laugh Love’ become unreadable in sculptural manifestations of themselves.

In works; Exercises In Spatial Mnemonics, My Dog, My Wife (all 2011) and Versions on a Calico House Cat (2010) Steciw references common photography; travel, family snapshots, pictures of pets; that may otherwise be forgotten, lost in data, to transgress to the status of “other”. This is achieved through editing techniques, such as the stretching and blurring of images before making use of readily available, online printing services.

These services cater to a public domain where, again, projected ideals associated with the consumption of objects and their uses proliferate. “Such systems are entirely reliant on context and composition and are fatally disrupted by even minor interventions. The assumed rigor of this relational system of symbolic language is what drove me to experiment with re-contextualising objects and images in an effort to create new or alternate ideologies, or simply disrupt the delivery of the intended ideology.” – Kate Steciw

The Green Room has commissioned a special limited edition by Kate Steciw of 50 such objects in the form of “photo-tiles” for distribution during the exhibition.

Kate Steciw’s recent exhibitions include Popular Options – Klaus Gallery, New York, Toomer Labzda, New York, That is the Dawn – Gregor Staiger Gallery, Zurich, Aude Pariset/Kate Steciw/Letha Wilson – Toomer Labzda, New York [all 2012] and Love My Way – Primary Photographic Gallery, New York [solo] and Notes on a New Nature – 319 Scholes, New York [both 2011].

Kate received a BA in Sociology from Smith College and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her book The Strangeness of This Idea, published by Hassla [2010] is distributed worldwide and her work has been featured in The Collector’s Guide to New Art Photography Vol. 2.

Beginning as a tour of the campus, an examination of Calarts’ site, design and democratic mission soon drifts into a fictional reenactment of the Post-Studio class developed by influential artist and teacher Michael Asher, whose extended group discussions have become a primary model for teaching in art schools today. Walk-Through examines Calarts as the one of the primary sites of the shift towards an increasing emphasis on language in art education and its relationship to the emergence of an information-based economy.

Walk-Through is co-commissioned by Tramway for Glasgow International Festival 2012, International Project Space, Birmingham and Cubitt Gallery, London.

Walk-Through is supported by Grants for the Arts and the Elephant Trust.

Image: Raven Row

Accompanied by a double-sided poster, Raven Row presents two exhibitions, Lifework and Untitled Structure, that will offer Babak Ghazi’s and Gareth Jones’s personal synthesis of art and life.

During the past four years Babak Ghazi has jettisoned his art production to concentrate on the manifestation of Lifework. Rejecting the completeness of an artwork, the content of Lifework will be communicated as an open-ended library or resource, in which found and fabricated cultural material is presented collage-like in box files and crates. Lifework is an archive, a diary and a confession – an unfixed ongoing project. It is also a fiction, contrived as object and performance. Much of its material records the successful construction of artistic personas and the way in which artifice, stylisation and self-invention can constitute moments of revelation.

Untitled Structure is a radically diverse series of works by Gareth Jones spanning a 25-year period, united for the first time at Raven Row as a single exhibition. Individually, the structures are elliptical and spare in their apparent refusal of language. Massed together they will saturate the galleries, indicating narrative through a defined vocabulary of materials and processes, and alluding to spatial relationships within the modern city and its interiors. This exhibition is in part a survey of Jones’ art, but in its playful plenitude and suggestion of a journey from public space to psychological interior, it is also a dramatic reconfiguration of earlier positions.

Babak Ghazi (born 1976, lives in London) graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 2000. He organises the Not Yet Night events series and self-publishesNot-Yet magazine. In 2008, his exhibition Model was featured in the Nought to Sixty programme of emerging artists at the ICA, London.

Gareth Jones (born 1965, lives in London) studied Fine Art at Newcastle upon Tyne Polytechnic from 1984 to 1987. Recent projects include a new edition of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray with Four Corners Books and a solo exhibition at MK Gallery, Milton Keynes. In 2006 he received a Paul Hamlyn Award for Visual Arts.

Raven Row is a non-profit contemporary art exhibition centre in London’s Spitalfields area. Housed within eighteenth century domestic rooms, onto which 6a architects have added two contemporary galleries, it stands on the part of Artillery Lane that was known as Raven Row until 1895.