Durbin Lewis

Artist statement

We are an Art Brand initiated in 2009 by John Rogers (b.1990) acting as director. We enquire into the perceptions of value in the material world. Objects are purged but venerated as the boundary between object and abstract is blurred. Objects become all the more loaded in their emptiness. With the creative process as a conveyor belt, the artwork as product – the artist as director we seek to alter the view that art is outside or set apart from business models, essentially to prove Reinhardt wrong:

'Art is not the spiritual side of business' – Ad Reinhardt, 1962

The historical weight of the readymade is brought into force to tackle the deep rooted symbolism clouding our experience of objects for what they are, we act in an oedipal relationship to Duchamp.

The brand purposefully generates its own trademarks; tyres and mattresses have found themselves persistently repeated in the product line as focus points for the disentangling of the readymade function. They are appropriated in order to narrow the saturated state of objects that we live in by using objects so ubiquitously found with our everyday lives but also due to their common place junking when their use value has expired. Studios in London and South Wales.