Lot Essay
Dutch artist Gabriel Lester studied at the St. Joost Akademie voor Kunst en Vormgeving, Breda (audio visual), at the Hogeschool Sint Lukas, Brussels experimental film and finalized his two-year residency at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam in 2000. Lester's films and installations work from the inside out. They aim to propose dramatic tension and question the role of the spectator. These dramatic propositions are either implicitly narrative, explicitly visual or both at once. The frequent use of sequences, parallels, visual and/or spatial edits compose a tension-span or even a storyline. Subjects such as psychology of space, the evocation of dilemma, semiotic set up and pay-off and re-visits to memorized locations, surface frequently in Lester's art works. The artist has had several solo exhibitions, amongst others at the Bloomberg Space, London (2007), GB-Agency, Paris (2007) and IASPIS, Stockholm (2004). His work was exhibited at Slow Movements in the Kunsthalle Bern (CH) (2009), at the Liverpool Biennial (2008), the Busan Biennial, Busan (2007) and the Baltic Triennial, Vilnius/London (LIT/UK) (2005). Recently the Dutch Ministry of Finance invited him to design a 5 euro coin commemorating 400 years of trade relations between the Netherlands and Japan. Work by Lester was on view in the group-exhibtion UNLIMITED.NL#4 at de Appel in 2001.