Event detail
Kim Baker - "Labyrinth II" - Oil on canvas 2008 - 186cm x 152cm
Sesame is proud to present “Thoughts and Secret Gardens”, an exhibition by two emerging painters: British artist Kim Baker and East German painter Jorn Grothkopp. The exhibition presents a collection of paintings that explore the abstract ideal of purity via the concept of the garden as an idealised, meditative space.
Kim Baker’s paintings capture all the intrigue and mystery of magical fairytale gardens. Using a layering process in oils she builds up a visual density that half-hides the forms in her paintings – marks come together to suggest a flower, a leaf or a clearing, and then flow out of representation into lush abstract brushstrokes and colour-play. Her dark environments make the perfect setting for the intensity of her marks, drawing the viewer into the paintings to then leaf their way through the fronds of colour and light. They allude to fresh, vibrant, verdant spaces, suggested by paint but fired by imagination. Kim Baker is a British artist living and working in London.
Jorn Grothkopp’s paintings present purified images of Koi fish that have a thoroughly mesmerizing quality. Working from isolated segments of photographs, he fazes out all superfluous detail to create a concentrated, essential image, which he then reproduces through carefully composed painted colour planes. These paintings teeter right on the far edge of figuration - the subtlety and economy of detail, combined with the balance and intensity of colour, make them stark, clean, but also subtly luminous and absorbing. Jorn Grothkopp is a German artist gaining an increasingly established profile in his native country, having had previous shows in Galerie Deschler & Hamish Morrison Gallery (Berlin), and Galerie Hartwich (Sellin, Germany).
Contrasting though they are in their painterly approaches, both artists push the boundaries of figurative painting, whilst still remaining thoroughly rooted in representation and the “real”. It is the space they find in between figurative and abstract, that imaginative garden of colour and possibility, that “Thoughts and Secret Gardens” sets out to explore.
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