Gillie and Marc and Modern Addiction

Modern addiction is the work of award-winning husband-and-wife team Gillie and Marc Schattner. Drawing on their backgrounds in advertising and graphic design, Gillie and Marc use typical elements of commercial art, product packaging and advertising to create artworks which are pure Pop. They say that 2/3 of three year olds can recognise McDonalds’ golden arches. Commercial products, advertising, images and logos saturate our world, but have you ever really looked at them? Modern addiction is an exhibition that celebrates our product-soaked popular culture. Drawing on commercial products, fast food, popular images, graphic art and advertising, it takes familiar objects from the world of popular culture and turns them into art.

Gillie and Marc’s spattered acrylic diptychs are inspired by their love of the Pop Art movement – especially artists such as Andy Warhol, David Hockney, and Burton Morris – and are also a response to the four years they spent living in New York.

Modern addiction, also includes a range of sculptures by Gillie and Marc Schattner. This work is again inspired by popular culture, taking its imagery from advertising, graphic design and the world of everyday objects, blowing them up into larger than life images, and disrupting the perfectly smooth surfaces of advertising through their use of highly-textured brushwork. Sculpture is a new and exciting development for Gillie and Marc, who are better known for painting. Their whimsical animals and almost-life-sized chairs are striking in a gallery, but they come into their own in a domestic interior, providing a witty commentary on our use of pets and furniture as signifiers of personal style. Taking inspiration from the work of Claes Oldenburg, this exhibition takes the objects of our desire and turns them into sculptures which are vibrant, accessible and fun. 

In times of doom and gloom, we all need to be comforted by familiar things. Gillie and Marc make art that is positive, turning an artist’s eye on the stuff that surrounds us every day, looking with humour, insight and irony at a few of our modern addictions.