Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to present PINTURAS GRISES, an exhibition of new works by Valentina Liernur. For the artist’s second exhibition with the gallery and debut solo exhibition in London, Liernur continues her exploration of quotidian city life through a series of seemingly monochromatic figurative paintings that depict everyday life through the surreptitious gaze.
Liernur’s practice is anchored in an ongoing enquiry into the physical qualities and mark making capacity of oil paint on canvas. The artist’s expressive gestural marks and impasto bring abstraction and figuration together distorting the forms of her subjects’ creating tensions and slippages. This manipulation of the subject embeds each work with a distinct visceral quality, exacerbated by the compositions cropped, zoomed in focus, drawing the viewer further into each scene, and removing clear tangible locations from the works.