Somewhere Between Reality and Obscurity

Hello and welcome to Somewhere Between Reality and Obscurity, a title given to an exhibition that is sitting as a real experience and yet surreal encounter simultaneously. The exhibition has been designed in order for you to see collections of works by 12 artists that I have selected to form this exhibition. Each artist has been chosen to reflect the diversity of artists living and working in the UK, as well as the diversity of mediums and visual languages being tested and presented by artists today.

As you navigate this exhibition you will be greeted by intimate small scale encounters, into larger abstract and gesturally bold work. Comedy, action, politics, nonsense, the body and shape are all present in the room. Allowing us to explore the micro concerns of a postcard size imagined landscape into the macro concerns of the world we live in today and how we might breathe into the future.

The exhibition opens with Jarvis Brookfield. We see a collection of paintings which celebrate a reverence for the majesty, for the internal world of being human, and the rich depths of mythology and ancient history. Light, hope and reflection are captured and retained beautifully within these works. Each piece and accompanying title present moments for us to look back and delve into our own psyche; exploring what is means to be human. What characters, where real, imagined and archived lead us to greater understanding and mindfulness about the way things are. There is visual power, support, saviour and salvage in the compositions that Jarvis offers the viewer. Asking us to explore what we might like to see as omnipresent in our universe. Is it that of a wrathful deity or that of mother nature as we move forwards.

We see relationships and links between Brookfield's work as we move to Timothy Hon Hung Lee. The work reflects majesty into dynasty within a more biographical exploration of the sacred and the holy upon reflecting on Asian painting practices through a secular lens. Where and how, within contemporary consumer society can this notion of sacred be found?. Works sit individually yet have been visually paired in some way. The male hand of Messiah (depicting the Salvator Mundi by Leonardo Di Vinci) and female hand of Divine Intervention are within reach of each other; about to touch, or a removal of touch. These ink pieces on Xuan paper for me illuminate a complex conversation around choice, religion, togetherness and solitude and the values that surround us. Further reflected in The void drones longingly and You Turn My Back Against the World; suggesting honour, acknowledgement or dismissal of identity. Equally the way in which Lee presents portraiture and or still life is one that subverts expectation and offers up a series of rhetorical questions to elicit an orgy of meaningful symbolisms; which perhaps paradoxically alludes to no meaning at all.

After engaging with physical and metaphysical histories, we are presented by a series of paintings by Parham Ghalamdar; whereby we see a more cinematic, green-screen series of provocations. Compositions present characters in a prop like, but still disciplined painted universe. When talking about paint, the artist pays close attention to the surface, employing painterly tools to create complex layers that present a stretched spectrum of paradoxical qualities; soft and rough, thin and dense, immediate and distant, examinate and fluid. It invites us to look and observe the tensions that oscillate on the surface. The works offers both reality and displacement , through its compositional and character traits that feel familiar and yet something we have to also come to terms with and reevaluate. There is a humour in the work to be enjoyed, for example, in the work titled Epic statue of a gay horse- a painting of a large stallion rearing up with great stature as if a new town public art monument has been erected, yet upon closer inspection, it is propped up by a tiny stick up the stallions rectum. The Same is to be experienced in the work Low budget western spaghetti with extra cheese, whereby a toy like cowboy seeks to dominate his terrain and yet is propped up by an inanimate stick. Suggesting to us that we must explore realities, their layers and details and how they can be experienced or subject to propaganda and slap stick. In contrast we see the work He was dead already, he just couldn’t accept it yet , a beautifully disciplined painting, depicting a physical struggle for air. Such intensity into a 'scene' with an inevitable demise; how do we think and feel in our final moments, what become our priorities, is it even real?.

Joanna Whittle's postcard size paintings of tents in mysterious landscapes continue to investigate an arena that is part performance and part lived experience. We understand the notion of a circus tent in space and its scale of performance and spectacle. Manifested into the opposite scale of a postcard. The works afford us a moment of contemplation, of souvenir and potential keepsake of a world familiar yet still surreal to us. Whereas Ghalamdar’s work suggests support structures (or props) for bodily or object based scenes, Whittle explores the structures in which fabric is stretched or painterly folded or draped. We perhaps move from film to theatre in Whittles work as it takes on a more traditional and historical set of references, yet surreally imagined and achieved with a modern ruin-like essence. Decisions to depict landscapes with areas of decay or overgrown in nature present an immediate ageing of the work as if painted by former masters. Such layering alludes to notions of revealing and concealing current or revisited histories. What would be visible if we were to walk through or under the fabric tent that is painted? A world within a world.

Continuing a dialogue between scale yet shifting the aesthetic narrative we move through Whittle's work into a more abstract, yet still densely layered collection of paintings by Lisa Denyer. The works show a core interest in handling paint. Using dense layers and theory through the subsequent support for this level of application, she works on plywood. The visual language within Denyer’s work is one that dances between geometric, architectural composition and line and that of a more painterly brushstrokes where the artist hand or action remains visible. There is a rawness within the work that explore a physical relationship to materials that we access within a built environment. Reassuring straight lines and marks against a fluidity of personal and emotive gestures places the work in a realm of reality alongside abstraction. We can relate to work that is precise and yet shows equal need for the artist hand to be visible and expressed. This bodily or outer bodily foreplay continues the exhibitions theme of somewhere between reality and obscurity.

Moving into the work of Juliet E P Gibbs we see painterly observations of the organic and the man made coming together. Showing us a collection of works reflective of the impact humanity poses in relation to the world we live in and how nature inevitably fights back. In each work we see a microcosmic environment built in an unlikely setting. Huge glass buildings (or houses) are constructed to contain exotic and rare plants, not naturally found in European climates. Otherworldly plants that cling to moisture and heat, growing in curated spaces. It is an artificial wilderness (much like that of a digital gallery) clinging to steel girders, concrete foundations and other support structures beyond its own natural rooted origins. These works allow us to reflect culturally about how we drag and drop, up-root, move and displace realities. Something exotic and rare becomes common place as a visitor attraction. In doing so we create absurdity as a result of expanding access to global realities and the maintenance required to ensure something of beauty can still breathe, in or out of its original context.

The containment of life and breathe is then expelled in a series of large scale paintings by Ellen Ranson whose work foreground the artist hand as action and a statement of intent. The physical, almost choreographic manner in which we can imagine these paintings being achieved are as much about painting and gesture as there are about making a statement. The work takes historical frustration around male domination and ego akin to abstract expressionism, and subverts it through the female artists hand. The artist desire and polarity to tackling institutional barriers play out in these expressive works. The strong and confident strokes offer up a wilderness of breathtakingly liberal movements for us to admire and live up to. However the works also can be admired beyond the notion of a fleeting set of marks through being able to visually acknowledge a deeper series of layers and methods of application that make use of domestic brushes from mops, to brooms. The use of DIY colour specifications form the titles of each work,  adding an everyday yet immediate archival snapshot of language and society today as a visual language to archive and explore.

We then have a formal abstract language at play in the work of Irina Razumovskaya. More noted for her heavily skilled ceramic works we are given a glimpse into her painting language and process in a series called Urban Milk I, II & III. These works, although abstract in aesthetic, are  autobiographical in they way the artist seeks to represent the sensation of growing up in the city. The feeling of the urban landscape functioning as a machine-like organism nurturing one's perceptions of the world. The referencial yet imaginary cityscapes are humanless but contemplative when thinking about how we collectively assemble or communicate in a geometric maze. Balancing ourselves alongside our built environments to harmoniously connect with vertical and horizontal lines within architecture versus archetypes. The artist leads with intuition and a tacit knowledge of materials and construction processes.

We then see the work of Sarah Gilman whose paintings depict commonly understood materials such as tape, cellophane, canvas, but as the main attraction when exploring the relation of trompe l'oeil to the genre of still life painting. The French term meaning 'to deceive the eye' places these works into a photo realistic conversation upon first glance. Upon further inspection we are allowed to move more into a conversation around the artfulness of illusion and back to the materiality of paint. There is something about being taken on a journey of flirtation, deception, optical illusion and back into realisation and reflection that presents a timeless simplicity to the idea that paintings act as a picture within pictures.

By this point in the exhibition we have seen variations on how works hold or expel breath and life. Leading us to the work of Rafal Zajko. Here we see sculptural works masquerading as artificial ventilation systems as a means to stimulate respiration. Installed on a back drop of NHS green, a colour associated to support and care, the works start to feel like bodily adaptations or modifications as if to be used, not just admired in the quest for eternal life. Our lives seem to work in parallel to yesterdays science fiction and these works feel like former and or future communication devices or lifelines. A single use of wheat within the piece Vessel conjures a balance between medical and mythical within Zajko's work. How are we to explore growth and nourishment, rebirth and resuscitation?

The body as a performative tool and reference within Zajko' work becomes the focal point within Jodie Wingham's photographic pieces. Here we are drawn into the sensual nature of looking at one another, or through one another’s clothing to the flesh. To hint at seeing the naked form is as alluring as to see it fully exposed. It is a monochromatic collection of flirtatious and sculptural works that take cold steel and aluminium as a way to frame and provide a surface for something more hot under the collar and carnal. The printmaking process in which the works are created offer further tactility and contemplation through the action of rubbing, pushing, rolling, screening materials. These works are invitations to look at one another more sculpturally and enjoy the art of glancing or perusal. We are allowed to be playfully voyeuristic.

We then come to see works by Hannah Campion. An artist who has a broad set of brushstrokes in the way colour and concept bleed into our lives through various means cascading, sculpting, injecting and immersing us within paradise like hues. You can feel a line of enquiry running throughout the work as if each piece feeds or is directly pulled, torn from the other in an ongoing investigation into colour and space. You feel a sense of intuition and process in the works with Campion almost being a facilitator of the potentiality of paint as a collaborative process with to that of the artists hand or intention. The viewer receives an invitation to actively generate ideas beyond having something depicted to you; we perhaps experience something as much as seeing it as the works emote and shimmer. As bold as the colour spectrum is in her work there are moments of whimsy, vulnerability and ephemerality; ending the exhibition with works that invite you off the canvas onto multiple surfaces and perspectives. We are compelled to psychologically inject colour into our everyday and imagine how we see our world developing more dynamically.

- Garth Gratrix 

Thank you very much for engaging with the exhibition. Please do continue to look at individual artworks by all 12 selected artists on display. The exhibition will run online until 18th December and all original works are available for sale.

Alongside this exhibition there are editions and originals available for sale by our 2019 UK Young Artist of the Year Art Prize finalists, which took place at Saatchi Gallery, London. Works range from seminal pieces from these artists as well as current works and editions.