AT THE ARCHITECT'S GALLERY
11th March 2011 – 28th June 2011
This Mixed Spring Exhibition brings together seven artists to map the changing seasons through texture, colour and light.
Choonja Payne works with a broad palette - extravagant colours of azalea or rhododendron flare out from the fresh green leaves of a sunny spring day in Richmond Park or in the reflection of blossom in a tranquil pool in Bushy Park.
Nerina Lascelles draws on her many years of travel to and study of the wisdom and symbolism of Indonesia, China, Tibet, India, Sri Lanka and Nepal.
Carl Melegari's paintings focus just as much on the medium of paint and how it reacts with the surface, as they do on the subject of the painting.
Kathryn le Grice is primarily interested in the patterns we see every day, in the cities, towns, streets and buildings that surround us. Her unique style of highly patterned cityscapes reflects her deep appreciation of the work of Matisse, Picasso and Rouault.
Drawing is the foundation of all Alistair Tucker's artwork - etching is a beautiful and mysterious way of drawing, full of serendipitous surprises as he studies the effects of weather and light.
We are delighted to be once again exhibiting the colourful glassware of Marcela Cinkova and the beautiful summer landscapes of Sandy Dooley and Maureen Davies.
MARCELA CINKOVA, PAUL SMITH, HUGH RUSSELL AND ANN PENMAN SWEET
AT THE ARCHITECT'S GALLERY
25 November 2010 - 28 February 2011
MARCELLA CINKOVA
Marcella Cinkova Was born on 21st March 1980 in Novy Jicin a small town in the Czech Republic.
In June 2010 Marcella completed her Masters degree at Pedagogical University of Ostrava majoring in Teaching of Art for Art and Secondary Schools.
Artist statement I design and decorate different glass items, vases, glasses and bowls. I also paint on flat glass, canvas and hardboard. I have tried painting on silk as well; that requires a completely different technique but I enjoyed working with this material very much.
PAUL SMITH
My work starts from photographs of urban and rural environments: photographs I take documenting my experience of locality. Photography has always played a central role in my art, whether as the finished piece or as part of the process towards a painting. Often the paintings are created from composite photographs, i.e. the sky and the sea are from different times/locations, altering the narrative of the final work. I explore the relationship between landscape and memory, from charting the post industrial developments in the North East since my youth, to filtering the wholly different lights of suburban wilderness on the Pacific Coast of the USA: a landscape that comes to us already narrated by hundreds of forgotten films and re-membered as a series of familiar stills.
ANNE PENMAN SWEET
I grew up in Australia where the power and scale of the landscape was a formative and lasting influence. Over the following years I travelled widely, firstly within Australia, and then throughout Asia, spending several years in India and later living in England and America. The early fascination with remote and wild places continues. I was and still am, drawn to the silence of the desert and the mountains, but now also to other places and other images that somehow capture the same sense of stillness, space and timelessness - old industrial sites on the edges of towns and cities, flat farmlands with huge skies, a lonely road in an empty landscape with a single set of headlights appearing from the gloom. The paintings themselves are not about any specific place, although I often use visual references in the early stages of the work - photographs, film stills, images from magazines. What I'm attempting to do through the depiction of these diverse and nameless places is to provide a space of resonance, of interiority and inner recognition - a moment of stillness. My abstract paintings are an extension of this exploration - seeking in a non-representational format, a bridge to the same experience.
HUGH RUSSELL
Hugh Russell was still involved with his design practice when an interest in abstract structural concepts led him to explore the possibilities offered by three dimensional constructions.
Subsequently Hugh created a series of works often influenced by urban architecture; by cityscapes with cropped views of high density buildings, unusual half hidden structures, brief glimpses of colour in an array of vertical forms confined to a narrow field of vision. All these effects are absorbed and recreated into his way of seeing, so that shafts of colour and recessions only become apparent when moving around each construction, an experience not unlike moving around a city complex, where colour, light and shadows appear and just as suddenly disappear.
Hugh's current work has a different concept suggesting disintegration - caught in a moment in time. They are as such 'Deconstructions'. There are manifestly contemporary connotations being displayed here. The desire to create some form of order out of perceived chaos is the core and creative motivation behind all his work.
IMPERFECT RECALL
Curated by Paul Smith
25th September to 20th November
Imperfect Recall brings together a group of artists exploring memory as trace and fragment. Working in a variety of media, all ten artists map the rich and unsteady ground between past and present; history and recollection. Whether drawing on found material, as in the case of Ceuppens, Reid, Sirbu, Smith, and White or producing false memories from the familiar outlines of 1960s nostalgia, like House, the works question simple notions of recollection and feeling for the past. Ceuppens's works are a serious play with the historical archive – the documents and photographs that form our sense of the past - as new works of haunting beauty emerge out of the paper chrysalis of these fragments.
Russell and Culley construct works that, in different ways, fix the evanescent traces of memory in forms that thus are inherently distorted. Shadows and outlines invite the viewer to supplement what has gone – to flesh out an individual and subjective aura of the object-as-presence – but which can never replicate the lost original. Uglow and Bainbridge work through layers of media to produce works that evoke the rudimentary, uncanny landscapes of the unconscious. Bainbridge's processes of making, photography and drawing remind us of the contested nature of memory in psychoanalysis: something laid down deep in the psyche, fitting primordial narratives of the self, and never straightforward photographic recall.
2th April to 13th June 2010
THE SPRING SHOW
A mixed exhibition of painting and sculpture
Steve Capper both lives and works near Oldham, in the Pennines, and these hills have had a major influence on his work. The hills and valleys, together with the man-made environs, produce simple, individual shapes, which combine to form more complex images. Moreover, the shapes and patterns provide an ideal vehicle for Steve's work with colour; his use of primary colour both enhances and emphasises the fascinating aspects of this special environment.
Ukrainian by origin, Ruslan Korostenskij, early in his career selected a most challenging direction in art - realism, and has remained faithful to it, his work may be joyful and thoughtful, contemplative and overwhelmed with unrest.
Kimm Stevens studied painting at the Royal academy schools and has been painting, exhibiting and teaching ever since. He has written 2 books on painting and also designs and builds decorative installations for playgrounds.
Anne Penman-Sweet grew up in Australia where the power and scale of the landscape was a formative and lasting influence upon her work.
David Wiseman spends a lot of time in Devon and the south coast but is equally inspired by local rivers and parklands close to my Ealing home. I am not so interested in the topographical exotic picture postcard view but in getting close to nature where the ordinary is extraordinary.
Liz Watts moved to France in 1992 where she studied decorative porcelain painting, moving on to ceramic work and subsequently to study sculpture and ceramics at l'Atelier des Beaux-Arts Henri Matisse, Creil for 3 years. During this period she lived, with her family, in an isolated house in the middle of an ancient deer forest. Here she spent long time studying, drawing and sculpting the deer.
5th March 10th April
THE BRITISH ISLES THROUGH THE EYES OF
Norman Ackroyd RA, ARCA, RE, MA
Jason Hicklin RE and
Alistair Tucker
etchings, drawings and paintings
We are delighted to be showing the works of Alistair Tucker, Jason Hicklin and Norman Ackroyd - one of Britain’s most famous contemporary printmakers.
Norman Ackroyd was born in Leeds, his love of landscape was nurtured on long boyhood bicycle rides in the Yorkshire Dales. His work is exhibited in most major art galleries and Institutions today together with many private commissions, one of his latest being at the British Embassy in Moscow. He possesses both self belief and humility and acknowledges that he is privileged to be living in a society that gives him the freedom to be an artist. We in turn are privileged to be able to display his work and to offer it to you.
Jason Hicklin’s drawings and etchings are horizontal explorations of landscape in black and white, and in an infinite vocabulary of greys. From 2004 to 2008 Hicklin walked the isolated coasts of Donegal and Islay. Jason has produced a set of 15 etchings following a visit to Islay in December 2007. The prints are made from zinc plates etched with nitric acid and printed on Somerset hand-made paper in his studio.
Alistair’ work is based upon the British landscape, its shape, form, and the effects of the weather and light upon it. Alistair says of his own work:
“I always find it extremely difficult to talk about my pictures and find it easier to illustrate what I am aiming at by making parallels with other things. The following are important to me. Gerard Manley Hopkins in ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ said;
I kiss my hand
To the stars, lovely-asunder
Starlight, wafting him out of it; and
Glow, glory in thunder;
Kiss my hand to the dappled-with-damson west:
Since, tho’ he is under the world’s splendour and wonder,
His mystery must be instressed, stressed;
For I greet him the days I meet him, and bless when I understand.”
29th January to 3rd March
Painting
SUCHI CHIDAMBARAM AND LISA HENDERSON
Philip Wells -
The Fire Poet
Suchi Chidambaram’s work has regularly delighted visitors at the architect’s gallery and her varied work has been very popular with collectors. Her paintings show the inspiration she finds in views of cities, their people, architecture and the myriad stories behind them that she narrates on to the canvas with impressionistic strokes of thick oil paint with the use of a palette knife. This exhibition will include works from her recent travel to Venice and Varanasi, India amongst others.
Suchi Chidambaram was Ambassador of Arts to the UK in the ‘India Now’ celebrations in 2007 and her interviews with both the BBC and the Guardian generated a great deal of interest in her work. We are honoured to be showing a selection of work especially painted for the architect’s gallery.
The reading room also has a special exhibition. We first came across, Philip Wells, The Fire Poet in his capacity as Poet-in-residence at The Chelsea & Westminster Hospital School , where he works with psychiatrically needy and profoundly disabled children. He has written a spoken word opera about Thomas Becket with composer Stephen Barlow first performed in 2006 in Canterbury Cathedral. The architect’s gallery was keen to find an artist whose work could be sympathetically fused with the poetry of Philip Wells. When Lisa Henderson’s work was discovered by the gallery it became clear that she is the artist for the task. Lisa’s paintings are born from a deep love and knowledge of the history of art and, in themselves, convey a sense of poetry which she has, for this show, used to create painted responses to the poems of Philip Wells using colour, texture and illusion. Her work is inspired by the landscape and achieves its characteristic richness by drawing on a wide variety of unconventional techniques and media to weave lyrical images. Developing her occasional incorporation of her own handwriting into her work she has, on this occasion, entwined passages of Philip Wells’ poems in his handwriting into the paintings.
Philip Wells has performed his poetry as The Fire Poet everywhere from Buckingham Palace to The Brixton Fridge, from Glastonbury to The Royal Albert Hall, from Newsnight to Radio Five Live. His latest poetry collection is Horse Whispering in the Military Industrial Complex (SALT Publishing); he has written and performed an opera in Canterbury Cathedral and has just finished his first play, about Saint Francis.
Full of surprises, life and art
TED HUGHES
His poetry is a revelation... there is a freshness to his vision and a purity to his imagination, both conveyed in idiom and imagery which have nothing expected or hackneyed
THE SCOTSMAN
The foremost performance poet in England
EVENING STANDARD
The real Poet Laureate
RADIO 5 LIVE
26th November to 29th January
REAL/UNREAL
A mixed exhibition of painting and sculpture
The 26th of November is the architect’s gallery’s first birthday. Over the past year, the gallery has sold over 100 paintings and sculptures, shown the works of over 50 artists and has played a part in the local arts forum by offering evening and children’s arts classes. In July the gallery was given an award by the Teddington Society for “significantly enhancing Teddington Town”.
For its birthday exhibition, opening on the 26th November 2009, the gallery will seek to challenge and delight its audience with another mixed exhibition entitled Real/Unreal. This exhibition includes surrealist, abstract and semi abstract works by both British and International artists. We will be showing paintings based on studies of Modigliani, Picasso and Renoir by one of our favourite artists, the Ukrainian Ruslan Korostenskij. Some of our regular artists, whose work has been much in demand at the gallery, including Steve Capper, Frances Jordan and Richard Corbett will be back on display. We are also showing Lisa Henderson a new artist to the gallery; her colourful abstracted landscapes are steeped in art history.
Artists in alphabetical order:
Steve Capper, Richard Corbett, Martin Goold, Lisa Henderson , Andrew Hood , Frances Jordan, Ruslan Korostenskij, Andrezej Radomski, Paul Smith , Maureen Stephenson , Anne Penman Sweet, Andy Waite
Sculpture - Liz Watts
19th September to 16th November
PEOPLE AND PLACES
A mixed exhibition of painting and sculpture
This exhibition explores the relationships between people and their surroundings, looking particularly at how humans control and influence the spaces around them. The art is both abstract and pictorial, the subjects both man-made and natural.
The work is as diverse as the subject matter. Some artists, such as John Ryan, are looking to capture and communicate the enthusiasm for the big outdoors. Others, such as John Murphy-Woolford look at
place-making created by the, often, little considered objects we leave around. His still life paintings imbue a promise of return. Anthony Barrow’s dancers on the other hand, fill the canvas with the voluptuousness of the female form in contrast to the emotionally charged brush strokes of Andy Waite’s work.
Artists in alphabetical order:
Anthony Barrow, Stephen Bishop, Jane Burgess, Suchi Chidambaram, Elaine Fine, Martin Goold, Raoof Haghighi, Andrew Hood, Michael Little, Jacopo Mandich, John Murhpy-Woolford, Sue Preston, John Ryan, Paul Smith, Alistair Tucker, Andy Waite, Alan White, Richard Wills, Jan Young-Levi.
If you would like an invitation to future private viewings please e-mail your details to: curator@thearchitectsgallery.com or or click here and fill out the form.
The dates and exhibitions shown are provisional and may be changed without notice. If you would like upto date information on the forthcoming exhibitions please contact the gallery. 29th January to 3rd March
SUCHI CHIDAMBARAM AND LISA HENDERSON
Bottom