Runway by Gillian Westgate 

Love Before Breakfast

RUNWAY

R U N W A Y

New works by Gillian Westgate
In association with Parker Pens

Runway is a new exhibition of capricious, large scale drawings and prints by Gillian Westgate that celebrate aero-flights and fantasy.

The series of work incorporates ink, painting, collage, printmaking and film, taking the iconography of aeroplanes as its central theme.

The exhibition harks back to a time when flying was sexy and glamorous, offering access to exoticism and pleasures unknown. Long before cheap seats and carbon offsetting led to air travel’s descent from glory in the popular imagination, it was daring, new and full of possibilities.

Runway captures this nostalgia, evoking the aeroplane’s heyday when rock stars, models and millionaires careened above the world, travelling to gigs, film and photo shoots, and closing business deals while sipping champagne at 40,000 feet.

The theme of flight as a means to escape and expand human reach is explored in Westgate’s drawings of planes circling oversized advertising billboards selling fantasies of sex, wealth and excess.

Other drawings merge the imagery of vintage airport icons and packaging found on airport sundries like sweets and stationery with anthropomorphic figures of lady-plane-birds.

Befitting their vintage-bent, many of the drawings were done with Parker pens and Quink ink, some are multi-layered collage and others, simple line drawings. All prints were made with a recycled ‘yoga-mat’ stamp and printed with block printing ink.



Gillian’s previous exhibitions include:
Vintage Quink Part IV: Into the West - Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, Oct 2007
Vintage Quink Part III: Pilgrimage - the vestibule at St John on Bethnal Green, June 2007
Vintage Quink Part II: The Homecoming – The Curzon Soho, 24 Feb - 18 April 2007
Vintage Quink - City Inn Westminster, July – Feb 2007
Vintage Quink - Curzon Soho, April – May 2006
Urban Tableau - City Inn Westminster, July – Sept 2006
Horse Drawn – The Other Cinema Gallery Soho, October 2004
Paper Planes - Curzon Soho and the Metro Cinema Soho, March 2003