Career
He is represented by MOT in London, where he had 2 solo shows, The Receivers in 2007 and The Painter of the Hole in 2009. His most widely known works combine second-hand posters with carefully selected slogans produced using WordArt, stencils and spray paint. This strand of Bedwell’s practice is typical of his methods.
The juxtaposition of found imagery with purpose built text creates an often funny, politically apposite, yet highly convincing brand-new object.
His work functions via a critique of advertising, logoism, signs and signifiers. Picking holes in means of representation favoured by the mass media to discover the limits of tolerance and relevance of ‘rebellious’ acts, and believability, within a given context.
Following the solo exhibition Gents: A Melodrama with 2 Acts at Platform, London in 2005, Bedwell"s work has featured a mix of more complicated subject matter and concerns. Seen together, Bedwell’s interventions establish a complex narrative that both engages with and confuses contemporary political and social mores.
With a deft humor his work both conflates and disrupts issues of class, race, sexual politics and art" Throughout July 2011 he curated The Hole, a series of 5 "long weekend" exhibitions in a newly built space off Walworth Road, London, featuring new work from Katrina Palmer, Lucy Clout, Phillip Lai, Tom Benson, Alice Channer, Leah Capaldi and Claire Carter, alongside work from Merve Kaptan and Laure Prouvost and others, in configurations changing daily and all featuring performances.
Photography and film was banned, and each weekend had its own numbered publication. From 2011 to date, Bedwell has been concentrating on ceramic sculpture. BANK consisted of Bedwell and other artists – Dino Demosthenous, David Burrows, John Russell, Milly Thompson and Andrew Williamson – who, throughout the 1990s and up until 2003, were a consistent presence on the London art-scene.
BANK regularly hosted shows in their own warehouse space which combined the work of the group with that of other, often very well known, artists in schizophrenic installations where it was often impossible to tell where one work ended and another began.
The group also regularly produced art-world-baiting material in the form of satirical exhibition invitations, provocative show titles, their own tabloid newspaper ridiculing the excesses of the London scene and a campaign to improve gallery press releases that involved returning said documents to galleries with corrections to grammar and tips for improvement.
