Detail: Mel Bochner, Oh Well, 2012.
Detail: Winston Branch, Mist over the mountain, 2006.
Detail: Werner Büttner, The Siege of the Sardine, 2020.
Werner Büttner is renowned for drawing out deeper layers of meaning from daily scenes that at first glance seem banal. His canvases and collages depict a tragicomic reality, confronting social norms with both irony and satire. The artist’s medium is humour – dark, unapologetic, absurd but always meaningful. His carefully crafted titles are sarcastic and powerful whilst often revealing a crude and bitter truth. The playful rendering of the pelican’s beak as the sardine looms in The Siege of the Sardine, is juxtaposed by the dark colour palette which highlights the thoughtful yet humorous manner in which Büttner approaches his composition.
Detail: Serge Attukwei Clottey, Debut season, 2020.
Detail: Anna Freeman Bentley, Next moment, 2023.
In early 2023, Anna Freeman Bentley visited the set of a film in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. She visited several locations for the production and uses photography to generate a wealth of visual material that forms the basis for her new series of paintings. Next moment marks the first painting from this body of work that is being prepared for a solo exhibition at the gallery in November 2023. The artist's interest lies in the atmosphere created by the changes of function in the various film locations and the sense of artifice and temporality contained within them; bedrooms that form part of the set, various other rooms filled with displaced objects, the media village (forming the hub of the film production) etc. In Next moment, we see a change in colour palette, with hues of pinks and greens dominating and an amplified luminescence – potential signifiers of the conditions of a hot climate. The detail of the lamp on the bedroom table, reflected in the adjoining mirrors where we also see traces of electrical cables, (a very small reminder that this is a film set), create spaces within spaces, imbuing the interior with implied narrative and heightened emotional intensity.
Detail: Olivier Debré, Untitled, c. 1990.
Painting outside, fully immersed in the landscape, employing strong punctuated concretions of vivid crimson, emerald and aqua marine over a fluid, washes of colour, Untitled is a prime example of Olivier Debré’s fervent colour field paintings. In this work Debré aims to remove any border between the perception of the landscape as observed and its expression on the canvas, through broad fields of colour marked by fluid weightless painting lead by interjections of gravity as washes of colour seep down the composition, coursing light and transparency to dawn.
Installation view: Luciano Fabro, Il joue un concert Sandwich, 2004.
Installation view: Luciano Fabro, Il joue un concert Sandwich, 2004.
Detail: Rachel Howard, Small Boats, 2023.
In Small Boats, Rachel Howard presents forms of synthetic nature through a veils of ‘fake’ flowers and leaves that flow down the surface, dissolving into the distance, as they atomise into a haze. Juxtaposed by sharp lines that slice through the spray, the artist prompts the viewer to consider is it weather, is it static or a glitch?
Detail: Yun Hyong-keun, Burnt Umber & Ultramarine #209, 2002.
While Yun Hyong-keun’s early paintings reveal a large degree of self-determination, the natural process by which they were made allowed to develop organically on the canvas, his later works, particularly those from the early 2000s, are more controlled. Architectural composition, opaque colour and simple form are hallmarks of this period of his career, which saw him introduce a new sense of geometric accuracy to his paintings.
Sherrie Levine’s art works have been interpreted as explorations of notions questioning artistic originality, authenticity, the autonomy of the art object and its status as a commodity. Inspired by an academic pursuit of post-modernism in her artwork, Levine gained recognition in the early 1980’s for her appropriations of Classical American Photographs and of the Modern European Masters. Along with her contemporaries Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince, Levine was deconstructing and reconstructing the very nature of representation. Thin Stripe #12 belongs to Levine’s early series of ‘Thin Stripe’ paintings from the 1980s which exemplify the artist’s sculptural interest in the materials chosen for her art works. Texture and surface are crucial elements in her paintings.
Detail: William Mackinnon, The three suns, 2022.
Detail: William Mackinnon, The three suns, 2022.
William Mackinnon explores the possibilities of painting through what is often a fantastical representation of the environment around him: whether it be a roadscape, landscape, or dreamscape, Mackinnon makes paintings the viewer can tangibly inhabit. In The three suns his animated and varied painting technique creates minute, textural details such as pothole and cracks in the road. These imperfections become stand in for tumultuous emotional states in which thoughts of trauma, pain, loss and longing are positioned alongside feelings of regrowth, regeneration and conscious reinvention of the self.
Detail: France-Lise McGurn, Epic 80s, 2023.
In Epic 80’s the nude female looks out past the viewer, her leg lifted. White hues diffuse across the background as a figure drift’s across the picture plane, juxtaposing the vivid application of pink and red. The assertive pose contrasts the sense of a dreamlike and dynamic fleetingness. The figures in McGurn’s paintings are recognisable without being narrative, seductive yet aloof, challenging the viewers with their distant and ambiguous gaze.
The present work is at once representational and abstract, morphing from geometric shapes into figurative forms found within the fictive universe of The Crystal Frontier, both quotidian and esoteric. In this way the artist invokes the plastic nature of clay, a malleable material that loses its elasticity once it is fired in the kiln. Distinguished by its minimal composition the work conjures a myriad of associative images, only enhanced by its lyrical title, which recalls a ‘capping phrase’, an articulation of the experience of enlightenment in the tradition of Zen Buddhism.
The Comb displays the essence of Isamu Noguchi’s poetic and deeply spiritual sculptural practice. In The Comb, material, medium, and form combine into one holistic whole: the smoothness of the vertical surfaces contrasts with the visceral rawness of the neighbouring planes, and the strict geometric interventions contrast with natural physiology of the stone. Noguchi’s almost mystical understanding of the innate qualities of his chosen medium allows him to extract forms that only he appears to know are there, and by capturing both the intrinsic qualities of the stone and the refined qualities of his own interventions, the artist brings together the two extremes of the aesthetic spectrum.
Detail: Georg Karl Pfahler, S-GRBL, 1967-1968.
Georg Karl Pfahler rose to prominence in the early 1960s as one of the first hardedge painters in Europe, known for his vibrant and colourful works. Despite Pfahler’s combination of different hues in a vibrant interactive manner, the artist advocated the independence of colour: ‘Colour has a value of its own’, he wrote in 1968, ‘colour is weight, colour is quality, colour possesses an inherent limitation, of itself, through itself, through other colours, colour creates space, colour is form and space’. His championing of colour independence can be seen in S-GRBL, 1967- 1968, in which he dictates its bold composition.
Detail: Michelangelo Pistoletto, Uomo di spalle con cappello, 1970.
Uomo di spalle con cappello (1970) is an exceptional, early example of Michelangelo Pistoletto’s renowned Mirror Paintings. Facing away from the viewer, a man stands to the left hand side of the polished stainless steel surface, hands clasped behind his back, his profile obscured by the shadow of his hat. Executed with crisp realism in paint on tissue paper, the figure stares placidly ahead, excluding the viewer from the direction of his gaze, which is steadfastly pointed both into the depths of the pictorial field and out of its boundaries. Reflected in the work’s mirrored surface, the viewer shares the figure’s space, at once animating and completing the artwork, and at the same time creating a compelling interplay between the object and its observer that poses a challenge to the traditional dynamic of this relationship. Yet despite this common experience, the viewer is unable to entirely infiltrate the composition; the preclusive direction of the figure’s gaze reignites perceptual conventions that prohibit the viewer’s total participation.
Detail: Jim Shaw, The Light of the West, 2020.
Inspired by a found advertisement from a 1950s copy of Fortune magazine, in which two businessmen are illustrated in conversation, The Light of the West reflects on the evolution of outsourcing business costs to third world countries. Shaw depicts the two floating heads as glowing ghosts in the hallway of a haunted mansion. Alternately smiling and frowning, they symbolise mania and depression, two symptoms of bipolar disorder.
Detail: Chibuike Uzoma, Paintings From A Week Ago, 2023.
Describing his practice Uzoma explains how from the first gesture that begins a painting, the artist could go through multiple states of ecstasies before it's complete. This high creates an addiction that causes the artists to return to the studio day after day, year after year, despite the bodily abuse that's within the process of making a painting. In Paintings From A Week Ago, oil and spray paint are applied in layers which overlap, distorting the printed self-portrait below and creating a window pain effect which asks the viewer to look and build their own associations with the work. Bold lettering has become a distinct part of Uzoma's practice, here the black lettering 'PORTRAIT' frames the top half of the canvas. Belonging to a larger body of new work these paintings stand on the autonomy of their appearance as paintings. the audience, become the medium through which meaning is derived.
