L’EST

2^nd Floor, 65 Ridley Road

London

E8 2NP

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www.lestlondon.com

020 7923 1814

Hunter’s Moon

SEBASTIAN BUERKNER/VERA LOSSAU/PAUL WESTCOMBE

6th-21st October 2007

Opening times, Saturday-Sunday 14.00-18.00 or by appointment

Private View Saturday 6^th October 18.00-21.00

L’EST London is very pleased to present new work by Sebastian Buerkner, Vera Lossau and Paul Westcombe especially made for Hunter’s Moon.

According to folklore, October's full moon is called the "Hunter's Moon" or sometimes the "Blood Moon." It gets its name from hunters who tracked and killed their prey by bright autumn moonlight.

In searching these artists’ practice, traces of a psychological kind of hunt can be found, resulting in visceral work of sublimated eroticism. The constellations of drawn penises; lips and amputated legs in the wall drawings of Paul Westcombe; sleekly made sculptures of oversized bunny ears and rough paintings of running animals by Vera Lossau alongside the exquisite animations of Sebastian Buerkner show the everyday as a surreal drama, which is equally pleasurable and cruel.

George Bataille speaks of eroticism as a primarily psychological quest and creative impetus, different from biological sexuality. These primal urges, hunting and sex are closely connected by the idea of pursuit, suggestive of both chasing game and sexual pleasure. Hunting is a taboo charged with sexuality and death, which when transgressed is expiated by testifying the transgression before being able to return to the profane world.

In Counterpath Jaques Derrida hints at yet another more subtle, internalized kind of hunt, where the hunter essentially doesn’t wish to catch his prey, thus being: ” …in pursuit of it while making it flee. I run as if I were chasing someone by pretending to track them down…while knowing all along that they are buried within my body and that…it is I who is hunting and I who is pursued.”