Aly Helyer: SOFT SUBVERSIONS

About

Herrick Gallery is proud to present an exhibition of works by Aly Helyer, featuring a series of recent gouaches on paper and new drypoint prints. Helyer's paintings are an explosion and re-imagining of mythological figures, universal archetypes, monsters, amorphous hybrid creatures, deities, bogey men, child gods, the iconic, tricksters, magic, voodoo...primordial images built up from ancestral and shared cultural experiences that surface by night in our dreams. Helyer says she is curious about what lurks in the woodshed and who is whispering under the floorboards or in the shadows. She seeks to capture fleeting impressions of these monsters and gods by painting with a mixture of conscious and unconscious decisions, chance happenings and a stream of conscious episodes. The world these creations inhabit is the other side of the hall of mirrors, she takes chances with them, ruins them and then desperately tries to claw their precious faces back from the mud, employing the skills of an alchemist. ‘Neither benign deities nor malefactors Aly Helyer's portraits meld a fluid past, present and future. Her highly charged personal investigations also create a platform for an exploration of painting itself.' Day & Gluckman Aly Helyer has an MA in Painting from Chelsea College of Art and is an established and critically acclaimed artist on the London art scene with regular exhibitions of her paintings and prints. She lives and works in London.