The Mike Kelley Gallery at Beyond Baroque presents Ansel Krut’s 26 Random Words Arranged Alphabetically with 26 Unrelated Images, which is based on his book of the same name. In the book, which is modeled on an old fashioned ABC primer, Krut takes 26 randomly chosen words and matches them to his own drawings without assigning any obvious correlation between the word and the image. Readers are left to explore the slipperiness of language and unlock the coded language buried in both the sound of words and in the way drawings are made. The exhibition shows the progress of the book from its initial conception through the various trial runs at the designers and printers till the final printing. The exhibition includes the first texts, wet proofs, front and back cover options, original drawings and other leftovers as the book made its way towards publication.

According to Krut: "I simply sat down one afternoon and wrote out the first 26 words that came into my head. Then I put the words with drawings I had made previously. I tried to pick words that were not too obvious or too loaded (except for X and Z) and some of them hover at the edge of recognition. Putting the word and image together like that almost insists on a meaningful relationship but as you try to find one you realise two things: first that language is very slippery, which is something we have to get used to now in any political context, and second is that there is a coded language buried both in the sound of the words as we shape them in our heads and also in the way the drawings are made, the way the ink sits on the paper, the weight of the line, the scratches in the surface. As a visual artist that sort of thing makes me very happy."

About Ansel Krut

Ansel Krut was born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1959. He studied medicine for 2 years before switching to Fine Art and he graduated with a BA from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1982. After a scholarship to the Cite des Arts in Paris he completed an MA in painting at the Royal College of Art in London. He was the Abbey Major Scholar in Painting at the British School at Rome in 1986/87 and then stayed on in Italy for a subsequent 3 years, returning to London in 1990. He now lives and works in London.

Krut was a visiting lecturer at the RCA from 2006 to 2014 and he has taught at many other art colleges throughout the UK. He was an artist-lecturer at the National Gallery in London from 2004 to 2012.

His work remains informed by the years he spent growing up in South Africa, his art retaining what Ed Krčma in a catalogue essay called “an unapologetic will to insubordination” with imagery that has “arisen from a ferment of intermingled sources: from the enchanted collective narratives of folklore, to the differently dark ruins of history”.

www.anselkrut.com