a walk at dawn and dusk

About

Richard Stone presents a showcase of new works together for the first time at Burgh House, a Grade I listed building in Hampstead, London. Taking the figure and landscape as classical reference points, Stone presents something altogether different. Cloaked figures face outwards towards landscapes they cannot see whilst landscapes disintegrate and reform as new transient vistas. From Caspar David Friedrich through references to Turner, vanitas and superheroes, the exhibition includes visually delicate erased antique paintings and figures slowly engulfed in ghostly and seductive auras of amorphous wax. The surfaces of the paintings have been fractured and partly sanded away to reveal delicately coloured carcass planes or bones of the original paintings now left floating on the surfaces. With the original landscapes now barely visible, new landscapes are revealed instead, balanced precariously between former representation and pure conceptual abstraction. Adopting traditionally heroic or masculine poses the accompanying figures have their features smoothed out, these once empty vessels cast as historical portraits or caricatures become plinths or supports for new sculptural forms, together through process new sculptures are revealed suggestive of a more contemporary anti-portraiture. Physical and conceptual states of metamorphosis and flux run throughout the exhibition and flicker with stasis and solitude when making connections between works, revealing romantic or poetic connotations all the same. Burgh House and Hampstead Museum, New End Square, NW3 1LT Nearest Tube: Hampstead More about the artist: Recently selected for the Threadneedle Prize and shortlisted for the Title Art Prize in 2011, Stone creates works which materialises in many forms from objects and installation through to site-specific works. These have been shown at Beaconsfield, La Scatola and Schwartz Gallery in London as well as at further galleries and sites in the UK and abroad.