BEASTS

About

Arusha Gallery is excited to welcome back award-winning Scottish artist Helen Flockhart this November as she returns to the Edinburgh gallery with sculptor Beth Carter for their new exhibition Beasts. Running from the 26 November until 20 December 2020 both artists will be unveiling new works in their first joint exhibition.

Evoking a mythological realm, featuring characters plucked from Genesis, legend, and the Greek myths, Beasts comprises a total of 27 pieces including 21 new oil paintings by Flockhart and 6 sculptures courtesy of Carter. From labyrinths and minotaurs to fauns, fowl and centaurs, the legendary iconography present in both artist’s work encourages the viewer to confront the chaos of the human condition.

Having received huge acclaim for Linger Awhile, her sold out 2018 exhibition at Arusha Gallery, Helen Flockhart (b.1963) is one of the finest and most distinctive Scottish artists of her generation. Her work breaks with established convention, comprising a blend of portrait and landscape and her unique style combines intricate patterns, backdrops of lush foliage, and surreal scenes that appear suspended in time. Her paintings are verdant, fantastical paeans to that particularist genre of British myth making centred on pastures, mountains and divinity.

Flockhart often draws creative inspiration from esoteric and mythical sources and in Beasts, characters imbued with cultural and mythological connotations, such as swans, snakes, leopards, lions, centaurs and stags, roam across canvases contrasting in colour palette, from dark and mystical, to light and almost divine.

Sculptor Beth Carter (b.1968) has a fascination with the humanness, something that
audiences viewing her work will immediately appreciate. The universality of mythic
narratives, and the symbols, characters and exploits that are thrown up by it, are prominent features of a body of work that is as stunning visually as it is conceptually and technically.

Carter’s work often morphs the human figure with animal creating mythological creatures and extraordinary fictional compositions. Beasts features 6 of Carter’s sculptures, 4 in her favoured medium of bronze, 1 in bronze resin and the remaining piece a mix of plaster, wood, acrylic and fabric.