Selected Works by Contemporary Artists and Photographers
Here are some gallery shots of The Last Man exhibition at the James Freeman Gallery, along with some photos of the opening night. We had a great evening and would like to thank James Freeman, the artists involved and to everyone who came down. The show is on until the 2nd August 2014, so a few more weeks to check it out. Continue reading “Art Circus Show
‘The Last Man’ Views From The Gallery”
28 June – 9 August 2014
Successful portraits resist description in a way that other types of picture do not. A portrait is something other than just an image. Simple images aspire to tautology; “I am what I depict” they insist. Portraits make the precise inverse of this claim. Portraits suffer from the ravages of their sitters’ old age and dissolute characters.
See these two black and white images of a man’s head, face-on and in profile. The expression is inscrutable; is it fear, anger, defiance, resignation? That his name, aliases, the nature of his crime and the date of his arrest are listed on the reverse is of no help.
The mugshot and the passport photo are the most straightforward, the most concise and accurate of portraits. They are intended only for the purposes of identification. They describe their subjects fully and simply, yet they cannot be fully and simply described themselves. The only way to make a portrait comprehensible is to dissect it, dismember it, reduce it to a collection of appendages and features; here are the eyes, here is an elbow… Sally Kindberg goes further; she has obliterated the face altogether. With cheese. Continue reading “Artist Show
Mugshots: Sally Kindberg + Philadelphia PD”
Neither solely abstract nor representational, the paintings I make could best be described as “figurative abstracts”. I aim to create paintings whose brush-strokes teeter between signalling some form of human activity or celestial body and dissolving into arbitrary painterliness. This concern also informs my actual painting process. I usually start off with a specific image in mind which then inevitably gets lost beneath layers of loose, intuitive brush-marks. In this way the original pictorial starting point becomes translated into a more personal and abstracted painterly language.
My paintings contain a certain sense of tension as they appear to be both spontaneous and highly considered. The modest size and round shape of the canvases is intended to convey a sense of delicacy and restraint and to give the paintings a jewel like, intimate quality. Continue reading “Art Circus Spotlight
Jaya Mansberger ‘Informal Elements’”
4th July – 2nd August 2014
Opening Reception:
Thursday 3 July, 6:30 – 8:30
The Art Circus is very pleased to announce our first curated group show in collaboration with the James freeman Gallery. Artists on show will include Vasilis Avramidis, Christopher Gee, Miguel Laino, Hyunjeong Lim, Mackie, Tom Shedden, Eleanor Watson.
Change is one of the few certainties in life. After death and taxes, the only thing we can be sure of is that nothing stays the same. As such, it begs the question: what happens when we’re no longer around?
Taking Mary Shelley’s apocalyptic novel The Last Man (1826) as its inspiration, this show explores the mysterious absence of humankind from the spaces they once inhabited. The ecological concerns of Shelley’s novel bring to mind: if mankind disappeared, would the natural world be free to reclaim what belonged to it? Visitors thereby get to take the place of Verney, The Last Man, in becoming the sole observer of an eerie lost world.
Seven painters come together to create this atmospheric exhibition. The unnerving images of Christopher Gee and Miguel Laino create a haunting, ominous presence, as if even before the disappearance there were clues, portents and signs. The paintings of Eleanor Watson and Mackie depict abandoned landscapes and structures like solitary markers, with empty rooms seen through external walls creating a sense of dereliction. In Vasilis Avramidis’s luscious works, green mossy hills emerge in the black of night from a subterraneous realm and morph into arms, fingers and heads. The Bosch-like theme is continued in Hyunjeong Lim’s drawings of twisted landscapes that depict a contemporary Golgotha through a cacophony of comic-book images. It is left to Tom Shedden’s paintings of an Elysian future to suggest a counterbalance of harmony with the new elements. Continue reading “‘The Last Man’
An Art Circus Curated Show
In Collaboration with the James Freeman Gallery”
13 June – 13 July 2014
‘Pushing Paint’ will showcase a set of artists using oil on canvas in a variety of different ways. From washes that have dried on the day to canvases so thick with paint, they have taken a year to dry. We will have a variety of both subject matter and style. The above list includes artists we have been working with since the gallery opened, right through to artists showing here for the first time. Several of these artists are receiving much acclaim at the moment.
Artists on show include Jake Wood-Evans, John Simpson, Sarah Shaw , Garry Smith, Harry Adams, Enzo Marra and Tim Fawcett.
30th May – 30th June 2014
Lucy Atherton has recently arrived back from a 3 month residency at the Nordic arts centre, in Western Norway. During her stay, she created a series of beautiful, atmospheric works, featuring epic rolling landscapes, exposed branches, incandescent dripping skies and poised wildlife. Lucy’s Norwegian paintings will be on show downstairs at Toms Skate Shop, 76 Stoke Newington High Street. Continue reading “Artist Show
Lucy Atherton’s Norwegian Paintings”
‘‘Memory is not a storage place but a story we tell ourselves in retrospect. As such, it is made of storytelling materials: embroidery and forgery, perplexity and urgency, revelation and darkness.”
Vermillion Hook, a collective of young London-based artists conclusion to its exhibition ‘The Wine-Dark Sea’, an exploration of memory through portraiture and figurative drawing. The show continues to ask whether a medium as scientifically exacting as photography and the immediate capture of perfect likeness can truly express something as malleable and evocative as human memory.The show brings together work by Eleanor Watson (shown 2nd) Luke Francis Haseler, Sean Rohr, Christian Newell, Luca Indraccoio, Ed Haslam, Milo Hartnoll, Meri Karhu.
‘The Wine Dark Sea pt2’ is on shown from the 11th – 30th April and can be seen at Mark Powell Bespoke, 2 Marshall Street, London, W1F 9BA
30th April – 31st May 2014
”The mind is a jungle. Kurtz knew it; most artists do too. Set off in exploration, and very soon you find yourself consumed by the penumbra, scrambling about to find something familiar to cling onto. Trying to get to grips with such an environment is no small task, and in Diamond Bullet we are pleased to bring together three British artists who use their painting to step up to that challenge: Simon Burton, Orlanda Broom (shown top), and Irene Godfrey (shown just above).”
23rd April – 25th May 2014
The Contemporary London, in partnership with Griffin Gallery, and curated by Michelle Medjeral-Thomas. brings together new works by Vasilis Avramidis (shown top), Jess Littlewood (shown below), Reginald Aloysius and Susanne Moxhay.
”Archaeologies presents alternative landscapes that invite us into uncanny private new worlds of imagination, fantasy and marked human absence. Both Avramidis and Aloysius create intensely detailed and skillfully delicate lush environments, where architecture is entangled with wild vegetation and the traditional and modern are meshed together. In contrast Littlewood and Moxhay’s post-Apocalyptic isolated spaces confront the viewer with a silent timelessness of cultivated order and the struggle for the ideal. With each of the works the viewer stumbles onto moments where they are forced to question the narratives of what has just happened and what events are yet to take place.
Archaeologies celebrates and interrogates images of opulence, fantasy, the remote, romantic and beautiful, architecture, sci-fi, failed empires, loss, history and transience. Where ‘place’ is usually established by the presence of humanity, these worlds are marked by a footprint of human absence and the reminance of material culture that strives to imbue its identity. These uncanny worlds transport and transcend, creating an imagined window of escapism from which to contemplate the human mark and its histories.”
Griffin Gallery can be found at The Studio Building, 21 Evesham Street, London, W11 4AJ
11th April – 23rd April 20
Bosse & Baum present ‘Digesting the Devoured’ Lauren Kelly’s biggest solo exhibition to date in a film studio space in Kings Cross, which showcases new site-specific commissions of large-scale sculpture that will expand to fill the space. The winner of The International Women’s Erotic Art Prize 2013 works with sculpture and installation, focusing on investigating the power of fetish. Influenced by Eva Hesse’s and Louise Bourgeois’ interest in bodily forms, Kelly’s work flirts with ideas of fertility and fecundity, while her repetitive forms allude to body parts. Continue reading “Lauren Kelly‘s ‘Digesting the Devoured’
Presented by Bosse & Baum in Kings Cross”
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