Postcards

[Michael Leigh]

Jeremy Cooper’s

POSTCARD SUMS

at

MARIO’S CAFÉ

4^th March to 26^th April 2014

6, Kelly Street, Kentish Town, London NW1 8PH

Monday to Saturday 8.00am to 4.00pm

10 mins walk from Kentish Town Underground or Kentish Town West Overground.

Buses 214, 134, C2, and 46 stop at Prince of Wales Road on Kentish Town Road, fifty yards from

Mario’s Café

Installation of hundreds of commercial postcards in two panels on the long walls of Mario’s Café, in the same style and technique as Postcard Patterns [detail illustrated above, in steel shipping container at Contains Art in Watchet, Somerset, autumn 2013]. This new installation, Postcard Sums, makes sideways reference to the work of John Baldessari and Lawrence Weiner, and to Sol LeWitt's publication PhotoGrids of 1977. There is also direct representation of the Serpentine Gallery's formula 1 + 1 = 11, devised by Julia Peyton-Jones 'to express the crucial importance and creative benefits of a successful collaboration' with her co-director Hans Ulrich Obrist, a postcard aficionado. The choice of venue is personal and circumstantial as three mornings a fortnight Jeremy Cooper has his breakfast at Mario’s Café, around the corner from his London digs, on fortnightly visits from home in Somerset. The postcards in this installation have been gathered since 1984, when Cooper began the practice of buying at least two of every postcard he liked, one for keeping and the others for sending. Since 2000 he has stored these postcards in categories, seeking out over the last decade standard commercial postcards in these particular fields, sticking to certain aesthetic preferences [e.g. mint, unsent, no lettering on front, largely bled images, no postcards of art except portraits, emphasis on similarities of patterning, etc.]. Of the 600 postcards in this double composition, one was designed and published by Cooper himself, in 1999.