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Art Circus Spotlight
Jaya Mansberger ‘Informal Elements’

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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’”

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‘The Last Man’
An Art Circus Curated Show
In Collaboration with the James Freeman Gallery

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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”

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‘Pushing Paint’ at Ink_d Gallery, Brighton

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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.

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Artist Show
Lucy Atherton’s Norwegian Paintings

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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”

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‘The Wine-Dark Sea, pt 2’
On Show at Mark Powell Bespoke, London

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‘‘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

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‘Diamond Bullet’ at the James Freeman Gallery, London

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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).”

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‘Archaeologies’ with The Contemporary London
On Show at the Griffin Gallery, London

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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

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Lauren Kelly‘s ‘Digesting the Devoured’
Presented by Bosse & Baum in Kings Cross

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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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Jake Wood-Evans in ‘Darkness Visible’
On Show at the Leyden Gallery, London

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Wednesday 12th March to Saturday 12th April, 2014

Leyden Gallery will be hosting an exhibition of new oil paintings by Jake Wood-Evans this spring, showing alongside lithographs by Henry Moore.

”Jake Wood-Evans’ work lives with and aspires to classical standards, and his paintings are tense with one of art’s classic disputes: the conflict between truth and beauty. His instinct has always been to make something wonderful for the eye; and his shows are shocking partly because of the sheer overflowing gorgeous technique they display. These oils are alive, and paying homage to their ancestors. A flash of Turner’s light, the glint of a Velasquez eye; Richter’s ‘technological’ blurring: aesthetic high points from the history of art are here. Dangerous company to keep, perhaps, but these paintings are triumphantly realized. Continue reading “Jake Wood-Evans in ‘Darkness Visible’
On Show at the Leyden Gallery, London”

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Michelle-Marie Letelier in ‘Magic Block
Contemporary Art from Chile’

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17th Jan – 2nd Mar 2014

Magic Block seeks to explore these relations, specifically highlighting artists working in Chile over the last 35 years. The example of Chile offers a compelling view onto the power plays of visibility and disappearance. The dictatorship of Pinochet, from 1973 to 1989, brought forward a difficult structure under which many artists struggled. And even now, in recalling its current traces. In doing so, questions of what was permissible or not lent to experimental approaches, and often the issue of what can be shown, and how or what can be seen, provided a challenging backdrop to the arts. This led to performative, ephemeral and conceptual approaches, inspiring artists to work directly in public space, while also turning inward to the experiences of private life, to gauge the politics of silence and silencing.

Continue reading “Michelle-Marie Letelier in ‘Magic Block
Contemporary Art from Chile’”