Jeremy Cooper’s ‘Postcard Sums’ at Mario’s Café

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Three mornings a fortnight Jeremy Cooper has  breakfast at Mario’s Café, around the corner from his London digs, on fortnightly visits from home in Somerset. The postcards in this installation at the café have been gathered since 1984, when Cooper began the practice of buying at least two of every postcard he liked, one for keeping and the others for sending.

Since 2000 he has stored these postcards in categories, seeking out over the last decade standard commercial postcards in these particular fields, sticking to certain aesthetic preferences (e.g. mint, unsent, no lettering on front, largely bled images, no postcards of art except portraits, emphasis on similarities of patterning). Of the 600 postcards in this double composition, one was designed and published by Cooper himself, in 1999.

This show is an installation of hundreds of commercial postcards in two panels on the long walls of the café  in the same style and technique as Postcard Patterns. This new installation, Postcard Sums, makes sideways reference to the work of John Baldessari and Lawrence Weiner, and to Sol LeWitt's publication PhotoGrids of 1977. There is also direct representation of the Serpentine Gallery's formula 1 + 1 = 11, devised by Julia Peyton-Jones 'to express the crucial importance and creative benefits of a successful collaboration' with her co-director Hans Ulrich Obrist, a postcard aficionado.

This is the second in an open-ended series of postcard installations – there will be two more variations in London later this year: ‘Postcard Paragraphs’ at the London Review of Books Café near the British Museum in the summer, and ‘Postcard Sustenance’ at Leila's Café on the Boundary Estate in Shoreditch in the autumn. These postcard installations take place in parallel with shows of newly made artists' postcards, the first of which was ‘The Postcard Is A Public Work of Art’, at X Marks the Bökship in Bethnal Green in February 2014.

A second is planned, this time of work by non-British-based artists, which it is hoped will trave to New York, provisionally titled ‘The World Exists To Be Put On A Postcard’. Art Circuit is arranging a touring show to provincial Museums and Galleries of select elements of Jeremy Cooper's collection of artists' postcards, beginning in August 2014 at the Atkinson Art Gallery, Southport, and running through to the end of 2015.

A major exhibition of the collection, which includes significant work from 1960 to the present day by Dieter Roth, Richard Hamilton, On Kawara, Mark Wallinger, Tacita Dean, Susan Hiller, Bruce Nauman, and others will be held in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum in 2018, to mark the BM's receipt of the collection as a gift.

Jeremy Cooper’s ‘Postcard Sums’ is at Mario’s Café until 26 April 2014

Monday to Saturday 8.00a.m. to 4.00p.m.

6 Kelly Street
Kentish Town
London
NW1 8PH