Guttestreker/Mirrors of Mortality

We reached out to Guttestreker about half a year ago. On paper it was an odd invitation. A space with no history, run by two film directors and a musician who had never run a gallery before. Not the obvious place to show.

But Guttestreker work the way the three of us do. None of us arrived here in a straight line, and none of us trust much beyond instinct and the sense that a thing isn't good enough yet. They found the idea strange and interesting enough to take the risk, and said yes to being the first to show in our space. Then they went further. They decided to make two entirely new works for it.

We thought we understood obsessive work. It's most of why The Directory/ exists at all: none of us are good at leaving a thing alone before it's right. Then we watched a Guttestreker picture being made, and recalibrated. Each one takes close to six months. A full composition drawn in pencil, then redrawn in fineliner, then painted, this time in gouache. But the months aren't the striking part. It's the density of thought underneath them. A figure in the corner that most people will glance past in half a second turns out to rest on a scientific paper, a historical event, a long disagreement between the two of them. Nothing in the picture is decoration. And we came away slightly humbled, which doesn't happen often.

For each work in this exhibition we've made a short film. They go close, into the process, the pencil lines, the detail you'd never catch from across a room. What's written here is only a way in. The films, and the paintings themselves, are where the real looking happens.