The Studios#1: new perspectives in painting Friday 29 November - Saturday 21 December Preview Thursday 28 November |
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Bringing together eight artists, each having developed their own distinctive approach to painting today, ‘The Studios#1 – new perspectives in painting’, is the inaugural exhibition of 'The Studios Gallery', and presents each artist's response to the specific practice of painting. Using simple yet powerful gestural strokes and mark-making, Bartosz Beda says "My paintings explore the relation between daily life and human nature. I perceive humanity as a chocolate cake. Through the application and process of painting, I cut a piece of that cake to explore the nature of these problems.” As a painter, Lisa Denyer’s interest lies predominantly in the materiality of the medium itself. Exploring form through a complete stripping down to elemental components, incidental details such as light reflecting, shadow, and negative space are often sources of inspiration. Denyer’s works are highly abstracted representations created through a desire to capture the sublime through simple shape and use of colour. Bethany Gray has evolved a working practice based on the traditional methods of site visits and preliminary drawing. From these original drawings numerous further drawings are made which slowly become less about representation and more about capturing the experience of the place which can also be altered by memory. The practice of Karol Kochanowski covers a whole range of various media and styles, such as oil/acrylic painting, collage, sculpture/installation, digital image or scanography. Presently focused at oil painting, He develops a matter of sub consciousness being the main link between artist’s practice and the issues of the contemporary world. The work of Phoebe Mitchell struggles with the notion of the ‘finished’ painting and the idea of painting’s subject matter in an age of digital image making inform her practice. The seduction and history of the medium coupled with an awkward relationship with her source material lead to a process defined by the relentless application and removal of barely-there oils, occasionally held in place by a heavier mark, suggestive of something concrete and in existence but denied an identity in the moment of the paintings abandonment. Tom Palin draws from the tradition of English and northern European landscape painting to explore boundaries between abstraction and figuration with a concern for the materiality of paint and the passing of time. The processes of involuntary memory act as a starting point for a prolonged game of assertion and negation. Images come, go and transform, layers of paint obscuring and revealing what has been in an attempt to arrive at a position between object and image. Jason Simpson takes a minimalist and conceptual approach in his practice at the same time having roots in traditional media and methods. His work is process driven through the use of materials and a response to their environment in drawing, painting, sculpture and installation. He is currently developing a body of work exploring these processes, through intervention, aspects of chance and the effects of environment and time. The enigmatic work of Rebecca Sitar presents pared down fragile images, like half forgotten dreams, for us to provide our own interpretations. These recent works on paper are drawn from late nineteenth century archive imagery, depicting everyday encounters in urban settings, on the brink of modernity. Evocative of daguerreotypes from this period by photographers Stieglitz and Steichen, these paintings in their two tone effect are the result of lifting the subject out of a wet ground. Fragments of a narrative set up an underlying tension, created by the 'what happened next' stance of the diminutive figures that appear in each of these new works. The show opens at The Studios, 12 Union Road, New Mills, High Peak, SK22 3ES with a special preview on Thursday 28th November, 6.30 – 8.30pm all welcome., and runs till Saturday 21st December. Viewing times Thursday 11am – 7pm Friday 11am – 4pm or by appointment tel: 07753842861 More info: New Mills – 20mins direct from Manchester Piccadilly or 40mins from Sheffield. |
