Winter Journey 2009

About

December sees the opening of Art Space Gallery's annual Winter Journey exhibition, an exhibition that takes its name from Schubert's Winterreise song cycle set to Wilhelm Müller's poems which describe an allegorical journey of the heart. This year's Winter Journey brings together the work of four artists who are deeply concerned with the nature of the world they live in and their relationship to it. Drawing on their own personal histories and references to myth, literature and to philosophy we see each artist examining their own identity through the act of looking, and depicting the world as they see it. Like Schubert's hero they describe a journey both painful and enlightening. John Davies works in mixed media creating sculpture that strips the figure to its raw emotional state. The ingredients of Paul Gopal-Chowdhury's apocalyptical paintings are life and the passage of time; souls moving from one life to the next might emerge as tufts of grass or insects and guardians stand watchful at the entrances to these journeys. Tim Hyman's world is a kaleidoscope of fractured images of London that are an investigation of his own place in that city; where he fits in and in what way he belongs. Henry Kondracki on the other hand takes his native Edinburgh and the seaside resorts of Northern England as his subject and brings wit and humour to the desolate world that he sees around him.