Vilma Gold are delighted to present Alan Michael’s first solo exhibition in the gallery.

Misery loves A Company that Makes Everything.

They say that in business, the term “boiler room” refers to an outbound call centre selling questionable investments by telephone. The term carries a negative connotation, and is often used to imply high-pressure sales tactics and poor working conditions. Or it’s also a global club franchise.

For this exhibition - “P.A.” - Alan Michael, himself a former call centreworker, shows a sequence of six paintings which follow patterns deployed in previous recent exhibitions such as “Calvinistic Girls” (High Art, Paris) and “The Manual xx” (Ohio, Glasgow).

While his practice has sometimes alluded to the work of other artists, it more often replays / repeats general types and formats of photo-based painting as if appearing to be in conversation with those formats but which, in reality, is more accurately about the construction of appearances.

Divided between paintings of men sitting in Omonia Square, Athens and repeated diffuse details of a fabricated mood board, any depicted reference material - cultural, sub-cultural, mainstream or marginal - is irrelevant and provides no code or key to accessing the artworks. The material is there to represent the process of generating ideas and the methods of acquiring information: negative feedback from overheard conversations about artworks. The acronymic title of the show is intended to suggest compression and provides the system to title the works.

Alan Michael was born in Glasgow (1967) and lives and works in London. Michael has had solo exhibitions at Tate Britain, as part of Art Now, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh and Schürmann, Berlin each in 2008, with recent solo exhibitions at OHIO, Glasgow (2013) and High Art, Paris (2014). He has, this year released a publication, ‘Unlawful Assembly’, with Lucy Mckenzie, published by Koenig books and launched at Maggs Bros. London, following their exhbition ‘Note to Self’ at Artists Institute, New York (2013). Michael’s work has been included in a number of group shows wordwide, most recently at Fiorucci Art Trust, Stomboli (2013), Circa Projects, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne (2013), Cubitt, London (2013) and Fremantle Arts Centre, Australia (2012), as well as ReMap 4 in Athens (2013). Previous notable group shows have been at CAPC, Bordeaux (2010), Dundee Contemporary Arts (2009 and 2001), The Drawing Room, London (2009), Tate Triennial 2006 at Tate Britain and Transmission Gallery, Glasgow (solo 2000) among many others.

All images Alan Michael, P.A., 2014, Vilma Gold, London, installation view, courtesy Vilma Gold, London