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Art Listings
LLOYD GILL GALLERY
Press release
for December
Preview night will commence on Saturday 12th December and start at 7pm and
finish at 10pm. Free wine on arrival.
The exhibition will remain open throughout the Christmas period and will
be closed for Christmas day and Boxing day. The exhibition will continue
till 29th January.
Gallery opening hours are Tuesday to Saturday 10am till 4.30pm
'Contemporary Art for Christmas 2009' group exhibition curated by Lloyd
Gill
The galleries principle is to exhibit National and International of an
exceptionally high standard. This exhibition will further than policy by
provided the same quality at affordable prices. Last year, the gallery had
a successful exhibition at Christmas and as part of the promotion, the
gallery offered free vintage champagne for purchasers to take home. We
want to continue the success this year and the offer of free champagne for
purchases will remain.
The exhibition will showcase examples of
Contemporary Art from a range of mediums including painting, photography,
printmaking and sculpture.
Participating Artists
Frankie Partridge
Frankie's childhood was spent at the local swimming pool on Jesus Green in
Cambridge,or canoeing on the river Cam with her best mate Lois, in a boat
made by herself and her Dad. Saturdays were spent drawing and painting or
making primitive comics with printing gel, or writing purple-passaged
novels. There were nights spent sneaking out with a gang of friends to
look round the fairground at the age of eight, or later on, punting down
the river from Granchester during May Ball time.
Frankie believed she was an artist, so Frankie went to Bath Academy of Art
to study Visual Communication. She spent four years there, studying
printmaking techniques, but was not interested in advertising as a career
so eventually made a career in teaching, after studying Humanities at UWE
and then a PGCE at Bristol University. Frankie went on to do a Masters in
Education at UWE, and a course in Dyslexia. She had a daughter in that
time, and when she was three, she wrote a visual story for BBC Playschool
which was presented in both the UK and Australia.
During the 1990's, she travelled greatly during her long summer holidays,
visiting relatives in Whangarei, North Island New Zealand several times,
making journeys through South East Asia and also visiting Ghana.
Frankie also got back into printmaking,
making monoprints. At the Praxis Gallery in Bristol, she exhibited her
impressionistic wilderness and rainforest prints, inspired by the
wildernesses of North Island NZ. Frankie was in love with Ponga fern
trees, in the primordial rainforest there, and the strange wild beauty of
the mangrove swamps.
She exhibited at the old Happening Gallery, with other artists, on Cotham
Hill. She has also worked on Murals with her friend Clare Calascione,
including the Balloon mural in the BRI, and the mural in the corridor of
Frenchay Hospital Children's ward. They also produced the mural for the
first Bristol Parkway station. Murals were part of her development to
large scale works. When the Praxis Gallery closed down, she continued to
Monoprint in oils with the Spike Island Etching Studio as it was then,
under Martin Grimmer. This was at Artspace, in Gas Ferry Road.
Coincidentally, Frankie Partridge was one of the founding members of
Artspace.
When Spike Island moved round the corner to its premises in Cumberland
road, she continued to print there using both the etching and screenprint
facilities. With Spike Print Studio, she has been involved in many
exhibitions including one at the Serpentine Gallery in London, in Bath at
the Edgar Modern, and the recent ones in Bristol at Paintworks and The
Awning Project. Frankie had a joint exhibition there with Maita Robinson
in November 2007.
Her recent interests in printmaking have been in two directions: the
depiction of light, colour and movement in water trying to convey the
essential elements and in the strange and exotic underworlds of people
that exist on the fringes of life, such as travellers with funfairs. Then
there are those from every walk of life who come together in love of the
'rush' of a 'white knuckle ride'. For this, the element of photography is
important for me as it is proof of the existence of 'strange' reality, and
it can tell a story without words.
Conversely, she also has an interest in brushstroke marks; these Frankie
loves to see in her monoprinted or painted work, as they are evidence of
the movement and touch of the brush - built up they recreate a new
reality. She hates paintings or drawings where you can't see these marks.
Her most recent works involve combining these with their antithesis, the
photographic medium.
Finally, Frankie is obsessed with the notion that the light should radiate
from within the image, and this is what she tries to achieve.
Antonia Hadjicosta
Antonia's work is based on recent catastrophic events that happen around
the world. She is working through photographic images that show mostly the
victims of these disasters. Her target is to evoke feelings and protest
against what is happening. Working mostly on small scale canvases has
given her the chance to use quick brushstrokes from which her figures
appear.
A main characteristic of her work is the coloured backgrounds of the
paintings. In this way Antonia eliminates many details from the
photographic images that she find's, while she presents only
characteristics that evoke her subject and idea. Antonia uses all range of
colours in her paintings, from vivid to muted colourations, depending on
each painting and the idea she wants to represent. In this way, Antonia
creates an irony that sometimes confuses the viewer about the story of
each painting. In some of her paintings, Antonia leaves blank spaces that
create a dramatic feeling, while this balances the whole outcome.
Antonia has been looking also into artists like Peter Doig, for his use of
photographic images as a source, his compositions and his handling of
paint and colour. Another artist is Robert Longo with his massive drawings
that represent catastrophic events, in a realistic manner, that seem as
photographic images. Ben Grasso presents imaginary catastrophic events,
in a realistic manner, which confuses the viewer as to whether they are
real or not. In addition, Antonia has been looking at the handling of
paint and dark colours of Fransisco Goya who was a master painter in
representing historic catastrophic events, like his painting "The Third
of May 1808",which is considered a highly romantic painting, even though
it was characterized by Greenberg as modern.
Louise Michelle
Reade
Louise won the Weston College Governor's prize for outstanding
achievements in the Creative Arts during her studies for a Foundation
Diploma in Art and Design at Weston College, in 2004. In the same year,
Louise attended the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff until 2007 to
study for a BA (hons) in Fine Art.
During her foundation course, Louise developed an expressive style of
painting that captured rapid brush strokes. Her work was dramatic and
mainly figurative. Concentrating on approach and process. Louise created
colourful works, which were the embodiment of energy. Her process included
using her fingers to implement the paint in a defining texture. She
continued to develop this during her first years at university, which soon
progressed onto her paintings being a little more controlled than her
usual expressive style.
In the final year of her University degree, she focused particularly on
portraits. They were bold pieces with large areas of colour, and in some
cases fragmented. This progressed onto the portraits being an abstract,
yet, linear line, still with a large area of colour to complement it. The
artist Gary Hume, who Louise had used as part of her research, largely
inspired these final pieces. In the year after her degree, her progress
had been limited. Louise made a few more paintings of portraits, but her
work was mainly kept in sketchbooks as drawings of things around her, or
from photos Louise had taken.
Her most recent work has been inspired by a couple of trips Louise made to
Venice and New York. These trips hugely motivated her, and she feels she
is progressing as an artist, as her interests are taking shape once again.
Louise became particularly keen on developing work from her "Bikes in New
York" piece. She was fascinated by chained up bikes she saw in New York
City when she visited in December 2008. They all had a similar character
about them, a sense of abandonment. They were rusted, and some with
missing wheels; they were everywhere.
When she returned to her home in the UK, she decided to paint these bikes.
Louise enjoyed painting them, particularly the long frames and the
interesting angle, which Louise had never really noticed before, of those
oddly circular shapes we see as the bicycle's wheels. This made her want
to paint more bikes.
Louise has become strangely motivated by these objects that she perhaps
once would have thought of as boring, and Louise is now embracing them. It
is not her intent to ensure them as political, although some may believe
so, but instead they act as an invigorating subject for her so far, as a
somewhat struggling artist.
Ryan Davy
A Taste of Male Beauty
Ryan's images allow viewers to be amused by showing men in unconventional
ways. The images are designed to illustrate the male form as a thing of
beauty and to be gazed at by everyone. Ryan is purposefully making viewers
realise that these images are also designed to reveal ideals about the
male body. However, the subtext that underpins the raw nudity is unpicking
the negative ways of imposing unrealistic expectations on men, for
instance, to be muscled or beautiful. It's actually hard work and a real
imposition to be the ideal, to possess flawless parts. Ryan is playing
with what photography can do. This involves focusing on ideal forms in
four strategies revealing tension between ordinary people and the
beautifully proportioned body that is a big imposition to achieve.
The first involves men posing in recognisable statue positions, imitating
symbols of the idealised form. Ryan is utilizing the average man to reveal
the pressure between the concept of male beauty and the everyday man. The
second entails literally imposing a photograph of the 'muscle man' onto a
slender built body using projection. This directly supports the notion of
the imposition to be the ideal. The third concerns men's representation.
Ryan's images are of men trapped in imaginary boxes. He considers one is
always trapped within a stereotype, constantly judged by others. Not only
is he making this point, Ryan is also making a joke about photography,
about being trapped in the photographic. The imaginary box represents the
frame, literally trapping men in their frames. The final is highlighting
the fact photography and society is obsessed with forming flawless body
parts. One is broken up from an entire person and people see others as
collections of modified physical forms.
Scott Fynn
Pegasus Grange
This photographic project was based in an elderly peoples retirement
complex in Oxford called 'Pegasus Grange'. Within the site there are
ninety flats, all of which are privately owned by the residents, all of
whom live independently. There are a variety of facilities such as a gym
and library and both indoor and outdoor communal spaces.
Initially, I expected Pegasus Grange to be quite a depressing place.
However, my experience, after meeting a number of the residents, proved to
be very different. These elderly people, although now with some physically
restrictions, are still leading active and independent lives. This
inspired me to capture and convey in a photojournalistic way, the
lifestyle of this close-knit community of elderly residents within the
spaces their lives in a positive, rewarding and dignified way.
These five selected images are part of a larger series. They were taken
using a medium format, Bronica 645 camera.
Jonty
Hurwitz
Science or Art?
The distance separating science and art is becoming smaller. As humanity
evolves, we become more conscious of a holistic "one-ness" in our Cosmos.
Binge Thinking is a collection of art works that are painted with physics
as the brush, mathematics as the canvas.
Beyond the Illusion
I was recently having lunch with an friend
who operates deep within the high art world.
"Jonty," he said, "I hope I don't offend you, but I feel you're the David
Blane of the Art world".
Actually, I happen to love David Blane, so my first reaction was a kind of
eye-twitching amusement. I have always wondered whether or not David
Blanes "tricks" are real, I so I can't deny that I did have a moment of
questioning whether this mean my art was somehow a little fake. We all
feel like fakes from time to time.
"Your work," he said, "is wonderful, its unique but it leaves no room for
interpretation."
Upon reflection and meditation, I realise that something much deeper is at
play here.
The fact that each of my pieces offers some kind of absolute mathematical
resolution seems to intimidate observers into believing that the
reflection of the art is the actual art itself.
Dark Matters
Dark matter. Put in simple terms (if that's possible), the current main
stream scientific view is that approximately 90% of the mass in our galaxy
is made up of deeply invisible stuff that nobody has ever seen. Put
another way, for every Sun (star) in the Milky Way (and we've counted
about 100 billion of them) there are roughly 9 more invisible ones not too
far way. It turns out that unless we can find this invisible mass, we
have no way to justify why our own Sun (and the earth with you and I on
it) don't go hurtling uncontrollably into cold empty space.
The whole concept of galactic-scale Dark Matter hiding under my nose
doesn't ring particularly true with me. Missing energy...yes...but is
that energy mass? No. Call it a gut feel - maybe one day I'll publish my
volumes of notes on the subject.
I believe that modern astrophysics has got its knickers in a mathematical
twist. It may come as a shock but physics is ultimately a matter
of belief. To mark this moment of astrophysical fundamentalist madness I
decided to make a dark matter man. The copper (which incidentally can
only be made in an exploding sun) creates the "empty space". The
'nothingness' in the middle is a man.
Alice White
The compelling energy of Alice's work is a plundering of documentation, a
revisiting of people or places, which are half-remembered. Alice is
fascinated by that which can be captured by an image, and that which lies
on the periphery of vision, perhaps caught in a brushstroke but never
entirely contained. Moments of beauty, of intensity, of tragedy gradually
become abstract source material, guiding the emotive power of her
paintings. The subject of her work is at once figurative, referring to
form and character, and conceptual, exploring accumulated memories which
lay dormant in the mind and which rarely if ever entirely surface. Alice
seeks to present the transitory, almost exotic feel of experiences and
instances as they become blurred and augmented in the mind; to create a
fusion between the intangible rush of experience and the evidence of
living.
FULL DETAILS
The Lloyd Gill Gallery
Lee House
13 Beaconsfield Road
Weston-Super-Mare
Somerset
BS23 1YE
enquiries@thelloydgillgallery.com
www.thelloydgillgallery.com
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