the Agency

theAgency.Gallery is pleased to present spectral paintings and video by the British artist Phil Dobson.
Dobson’s works depart from painting in the analogue sense, but the sequences he depicts take on a visceral, architectural and occasionally sonic quality. He works sequentially with pure colour and layered minimal compositions where the surface also develops three-dimensionally. In free association linguistic, atomic and molecular structures merge with sonic waves translated into visuals.
Dobson credits the sonic influence in his work largely to the keyworks by female electronic music pioneers form the Sixties and Seventies, such as Daphne Oram, Delia Derbyshire, Eliane Radigue, Laurie Spiegel and Pauline Oliveros who shaped minimal music.

Dobson’s new moving image works will be a direct homage to the work of the composers, whose works remains under the radar because the histories of electronic music focus almost exclusively on men. The women pioneers worked alongside Terry Riley, Morton Subotnick and Steve Reich, as well as creating optical synthesizers and the early Apple MIDI music programme. The artist is presenting the first of a series of video sequences taking their cue from the sonic and visual explorations of the female sound-avantguardists reminding us to include their achievements into our histories.

The influence of minimal electronics and the analogue-digital transition is palpable in Dobson’s works, which have been evolving since the late Seventies. The artist also occasionally collaborates with the artist and designer Brigitte Stepputtis on selected creative projects, including “Gutenberg’s Galaxy”, a large-scale architectural installation for the first Jikji International Festival in South Korea 2016.