Forthcoming exhibitions previewing on Friday 3 February
The project ealingfaces by local artist Nadja Plein began with a desire to create a series of portraits that would form a coherent family of pictures.
Nadja is interested in looking at painting from the point of view of an installation. With an installation the spectator often experiences the piece by physically entering into its space. With a painting the spectator generally stays outside of the picture (at least physically), unless the whole work consists of several paintings that frame a room. Examples of this can be seen in the series of murals Mark Rothko originally created for New York’s Four Seasons restaurant or Gerhard Richter’s Cage series.
She's interested in exploring ways in which an installation of paintings can manipulate the atmosphere of a room, and thus invite the spectator to physically enter the work.
Nadja chose Ealing because this is where she lives and works. She put up ads for volunteers and was delighted by how many people came forward. She had far more volunteers than she was able to paint. She did not select the sitters but painted them on a first come first serve basis and did not try to make this representative of the different communities who live in Ealing, but rather a random handful of people who happened to have walked past her ad.
The volunteer sitters came to her studio at OPEN Ealing for one or two days and she painted them from life during intense fast-paced sessions.
All the pictures from this series will also be available to purchase as posters and canvas prints on Saatchi Online for the duration of the exhibition which runs until 24 February 2012.
Many thanks to all who took part!
Minimal Excess
John Wilkins, Claude Temin-Vergez, Miho Sato, Michal Sluslakowicz, Matthew Draper, Juan Bolivar, Philip Booth.
This exhibition is looking at the work of artists across at least 3 painting generations. The pieces presented embrace a sense of the mundane and overlooked and turn it into quiet monumentalism. Sometimes inconspicuous images are morphed into instant icons as in the work of Sato.
Her distinctive reduced palette gives those seemingly familiar images the look of classic timeless memories. Draper finds interest in the dissolute private live of silently wild domestic items. The tiny details of everyday life in his work are turned into dangerous ‘fantasia-like’ arrangement leaving the viewer unsure of whether he should feel seduced or threatened. A sense of humour is also latent in the work and shared by Wilkins and Bolivar’s approach.
These works seem to scrutinise an exhausted sense of modernist aesthetic and turn it into ridiculously sublime compositions. Vergez takes the enemy of modernism ‘par excellence’ namely decoration and turn it into a quiet monster, unsure of its status on the surface of the painting between pattern making and bulbous formation. While Booth and Sluslakowicz display high virtuosity in their depiction of calmly unsettling images full of uneasy sexual energy.
2nd February 2012