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Zoë Mendelson (born 17 April 1976) is a London-based British artist. Her father is television comedy writer Paul Mendelson.

Biography

Mendelson studied Fine Art, Painting at Chelsea College of Art and Design from 1995 to 1998 and Painting at the Royal College of Art from 1998 to 2000. She gained her practice-based PhD in 2015 from Central Saint Martins.

Zoë Mendelson lives and works in London and is Course Leader for Painting at Wimbledon College of Arts. At Wimbledon she co-convenes the network paintingresearch with fellow artist, Geraint Evans. Mendelson's studio is in East London at Chisenhale Art Place, where she has worked for ten years.

Mendelson has shown widely, predominantly in Europe, including at the Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain in Paris in 2005 and Chapter Centre for Contemporary Arts in Cardiff in 2006. She speaks regularly at conferences and symposia, often engaging performance as a medium for giving papers.

Work

Mendelson’s artistic practice is multi-disciplinary with drawing pivotal, and relationships sustained between temporal and permanent supports. She mostly makes drawing, collage, performance and site-specific installation. Her intricate drawings and collages occur on paper, walls, and often within communication devices (as allegorical to her process) and within objects such as defunct projectors, fax machines and furniture. Mendelson has described her work as possessing "conflicting roots in decoration, psychoanalysis and the functionality proposed by Modernist thought".

In 2010 four of Mendelson's works were selected by Artsadmin and Iwona Blazwick to be permanently installed at Town Hall Hotel, London.

In 2007 Mendelson made an online work commissioned by Cartier. Titled The Envelope Machine it references advances in postal technologies at the time of the 1851 Great Exhibition in London and operates as a hand drawn, and ultimately unrequited, version of Outlook Express.

Also in 2007, Mendelson received an Arts Council England Grant for the Arts to create a work called Scheherezade's Sideboard which has since been shown at Transition Gallery, London and Galerie Edouard Manet, Gennevilliers.

As part of a solo show on 26 November 2008 Mendelson performed with a sugarcrafter at Galerie Édouard Manet, Gennevilliers. For four hours they constructed drawn and sugared sandcastles, which were then eaten and erased.

Curator, critic and artist, Gordon Dalton has described Mendelson’s installational practice, saying,

Zoë Mendelson’s practice operates in two distinctly separate but related ways. One is the peace and relative calm of her commitment to drawing in the studio, searching through source material that includes wildlife photos, porn magazines and pictures of domestic furniture. The second part sees her operating out of the safety and confines of the studio and in large temporary spaces, drawing directly onto the wall, and using the context of the space to spark some kind of intuition. This performative act plays out within the deadlines, noise and nature of the space but the former studio practice has a long-lingering influence. From ‘Fable’, catalogue, Chapter Centre for Contemporary Arts, Cardiff, May 2006

Bibliography

• Fable, Exhibition Catalogue, Angela Kingston and Gordon Dalton, Chapter Publications, ISBN 1-900029-22-7
• J'en rêve, Exhibition Catalogue, Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain, ISBN 978-2-7427-5776-3
• The Artist's Yearbook, Ed. Ossian Ward, essay by Zoe Mendelson, pub. Thames & Hudson, editions 2007 and 2008/09, ISBN 978-0-500-28613-5; ISBN 978-0-500-28692-0

External links

• Artist's website
• Artist's blog
• Chapter Centre for the Contemporary Arts
• Fondation Cartier de l’Art Contemporain

• 1976 births
• British draughtsmen
• Collage artists
• Living people