Artist: Seb Patane

Maureen Paley presents the third solo exhibition, In the Sharp Gust of Love, of Seb Patane at the gallery, in Studio M. The title of the exhibition is borrowed from the opening lyrics of a Siouxsie and the Banshees song, The Last Beat of My Heart (1988), a ballad in which Siouxsie declares her yearning for a lover to return.

In the Sharp Gust of Love is centred on a queer mode of desire and longing, intertwining the personal with the historical to render the past through an inherently subjective and continually mutable perspective. By blending biographical references with period images and found photographs, Patane seeks to create dynamic narratives, locating the subversive power to be found in the process of collage.

Patane centres archival practices in his work. He adapts pictures of actors from Victorian and Edwardian theatre magazines, decorating them with ballpoint pen marks, enamel, applications of paint, pressed flowers, and paper, revoking the static confinement of historical portraiture for something charged with performative potential. His drawings display their theatrical construction in the densely scribbled ink, intricately layered assemblage, and partially obscured photography.

In the Untitled Glee series, Patane has adapted screenshots from gay dating profiles through collages which are later screen printed onto vintage clothing patterns, emphasising the mutability of gender tropes by placing masculine bodies onto a historically feminised material. The loudspeakers mask identities, but also hint to his wider interest in sound and music, reflecting a belief in marginalised communities to be both vocal and transformative. Patane is also interested in the potential for contemporary music to distort the body through vocal experimentation and sonic manipulation, noting the queer desire for physical transformance contained within these distortions.

Seb Patane (b. 1970, Catania, Italy) lives and works in London. Solo exhibitions include Glee, Ridley Road Project Space, London, UK (2021); Vauxhall Ever Green, Hudson Yards, New York, USA (2020); Vorrei Regnare, Palazzo Vigo, Riposto, iTALY (2017); As Unreal as Everything Else, Museo Civico, Castelbuono, Palermo, Italy (2015); La Kunsthalle Mulhouse, Mulhouse, France (2011); Maureen Paley, London, UK (2009); So this song kills fascists, Art Now, Tate Britain, London, UK (2008); Maureen Paley, London, UK (2006).

Selected group exhibitions include Intermezzo Strumentale, Fonti, Naples, Italy (2021); Pushing paper: Contemporary Drawing from 1970 to Now, British Museum, London, UK (2019); Bumped Bodies, Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2018); Collections on display: Rituals, Migros Museum, Zurich, Switzerland (2017); The map is more interesting than the territory, Hamburg Kunstverein, Hamburg, Germany (2017); No New Thing Under The Sun, Royal Academy of Art, London, UK (2010); Drawing Collection, Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA (2009); Beck’s Futures, Institute of Contemporary Art, London, UK (2006); and The Black Album, Maureen Paley, London, UK (2004).