Josh Lilley is delighted to announce A Broken Fall, featuring new work by Appau Junior Boakye-Yiadom, Benedetto Pietromarchi, Conrad Shawcross, and Daniel Wallis. This first sculpture exhibition at the gallery aims to present a platform for four distinctive practices taking place in London in late 2009, providing individual experiences and responses within the various spaces the gallery allows.

The exhibition — titled in homage to Bas Jan Ader — will also highlight common aspects in the artists practice on notions of the idealistic and the irrational, elements of odyssey, noble failure and endeavour, while at the same time vividly expressing a sense of enjoyment in the construction of things and the manipulation of certain objects into often redundant yet aesthetically beautiful forms. Drawing, video and small-scale sculptures will also be present, acting as revealing insights into the development of these wilfully optimistic artworks, whose attitude, energy, spirit, vulnerability and sense of potential failure all find links to certain sentiments in Ader's production nearly forty years ago.

Appau Junior Boakye-Yiadom takes the readymade as his starting point, setting up situations of everyday objects that are then activated during a brief performance. Interested in the transformation of object into absurd sculpture, Boakye-Yiadom uses paint, liquids or plaster to enact the event. The action's aftermath as well as the photographic or filmed record of it all then becoming part of the work itself. By recording a visual archive of the creation of the piece, his video documentation also provides an exposé into the vulnerability and banality within an artist's practice.

Benedetto Pietromarchi's sculptures are primarily influenced by notions of displacement, voyage and travel. Working across a variety of materials including terracotta, lead, stainless steel and wood, Pietromarchi creates fantastical mechanisms and modes of transport, where the tension in materiality allow his playfully surreal objects to become monumental as they morph into redundant yet formally powerful structures.

Conrad Shawcross' sculptures are imbued with an appearance of scientific rationality, yet explore subjects that lie on the borders of geometry and philosophy, physics and metaphysics. Attracted by failed quests for knowledge in the past, he often appropriates redundant theories and methodologies to create ambitious structural and mechanical montages, using a wide variety of materials and media.

Daniel Wallis' practice is a playful one of meandering, manipulated, and poetically simple incidents. When creating a body of work he tends to find a system of organising and making things, and then allows it to evolve naturally, often being humorously disrupted by mischievous and animated constructions. Notions of weight, balance, replication and implied function help to dictate the works' development, but can seemingly become superfluous to the works' ultimate installation.

Appau Junior Boakye-Yiadom (b. 1984, London, UK) graduated from the Royal Academy Schools in 2008. Recent exhibitions include the solo show Backwash at Primo Alonso Gallery, London, 2009, and group exhibitions Paperview, at John Jones The Project Space, London 2009, and The Future Can Wait at the Truman Brewery, London in 2008. He lives and works in London.

Benedetto Pietromarchi (b. 1972, Rome, Italy) has presented solo shows include Carrozza at Flora Fairbairn Projects, London, in 2007, It's for Real at b-49 project space in Rome in 2007 and Meteopathic at Trolley Gallery, London in 2005. Group shows include Avatar of Sacred Discontent at Flora Fairbairn Projects in 2007, Reconstruction 1 at Sudeley Castle in 2006, New Sculpture at Museum 52, London, and Sine Qua Non at Bischoff/Weiss, London in 2005. He is currently artist-in-residence at the Kenneth Armitage Foundation in London until 2011.

Conrad Shawcross (b. 1977, London, UK) will present Chord, a major new site-specific commission by Measure Arts, as part of a unique temporary opening of the Kingsway Tram Subway in Holborn, London, in October 2009. His recent solo exhibitions include Control at Location One, New York, and Light Perpetual at Jenaer Kunstverein, Germany, in 2008. His work has also been exhibited internationally at institutions including Musée d'art Contemporain, Lyon, Art Basel | 39 Public Art Projects, and La Chapelle de L'Ecole National Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2008. His group exhibitions include participation in the Third Moscow Biennale for Contemporary Art and A Duck for Mr Darwin at the BALTIC Centre of Contemporary Art, in Newcastle in 2009. He is currently artist-in-residence at the Science Museum, London.

Daniel Wallis (b. 1981, Maidstone, UK) graduated from the Royal Academy Schools in 2007. Recent exhibitions include the solo show Evolved Means at Allsopp Contemporary, London, 2008; and the group shows Sons and Lovers at 52 Meters, London, 2009; Monster at the Dazed & Confused Gallery, London, and A Stain Upon the Silence at Central Saint Martins, 2008.