For his first solo exhibition in London, Roy Arden presents a new emotional work, "The Homosexual Who Wrecked an Empire": a Wunderkammer that including collages, drawings, paintings, sculpture and video. The exhibition will be presented on October 6th at Brancolini Grimaldi art gallery.

Arden is one of Canada’s most respected artists and performer and in the UK is known for his photographic work from the 1990s that represents the changing urban landscape of Vancouver as the city was being transformed by re-development with the boom in real estate. Arden has described these photographs works "...as battle scenes, like war landscapes, but it's the economic war".

Arden has created his own immense and complex archive of images, that he has collected from newspapers, magazines and the internet that he continually uses in his different series of works. And even if his working practice becoming different over the last decade some themes are always present: history, modernity and archive. Driven by a personal necessity, Arden delves, studying in deep, into the trash heap of history for images that reveal something about how and why we arrived at our present predicament. Arden's paper collages are intimate in scale and seem to channel the history of collage while entertaining various subjects through their kaleidoscope of cut and torn fragments.

His digital collages are generally more orderly and speak of the need to archive and its attendant folly. One work above all, the web-based project made in 2004 entitled "The World as Will and Representation", included over 28,000 jpegs.

The graphic style of Arden's more recent paintings and drawings is similar to early Pop Art but always with critical intent. His recent sculptures, constructed from discarded appear as though they are the idiosyncratic creations of a bricoleur or rag & bone man with spare time and imagination. This exhibition will also premiere a new video projection entitled Jalopy (2011) which features an antique wind-up Model A Ford toy performing a seemingly demonic routine.

Roy Arden was born in Vancouver in 1957. He completed a Masters of Fine Arts degree under Jeff Wall at the University of British Columbia in 1990. His work can be found in numerous public collections in North America and Europe, including The National Gallery of Canada, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart. He has exhibited in dozens of international exhibitions from New York to Sharjah and Berlin to Sydney. In 2007 the Vancouver Art Gallery mounted a survey show of his work covering the period 1981-2007. His last exhibition in the UK was a survey of works from 1985-2000 at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham in 2006.

For more informations about the artist and the exhibition: www.brancolinigrimaldi.com