Crinkled Escape Routes and Other Somewhat Flat Things

About

Gleaming, pastel visions spread out across the gallery – images of cars, signposts, highways and flat, desert landscapes are obscured as if by fog. Existing in open-ended otherworldly plane, they are familiar yet, somehow, removed. Kristin Hjellegjerde is pleased to host new work by London-based Norwegian artist Martine Poppe in her second solo show at the gallery, Crinkled Escape Routes and Other Somewhat Flat Things (6th of May – 18th of June 2016). Meanwhile, the gallery’s adjacent Project Space will feature works by London and Los Angeles-based abstract painter William Bradley.

Crinkled Escape Routes and Other Somewhat Flat Things combines the language of Martine Poppe’s pale and ephemeral aesthetic with blurred landscapes, the gallery given over to a dialogue created by the juxtaposition of these dreamy canvases with images from the American wilderness as seen along the country’s long rural highways.  Assembled from images shot along the iconic Route 66, the works take the viewer on a journey through landscapes mental and external, shifting back and forth between the present and the part-remembered, part-constructed ideal. 

Meanwhile, in the Project Space London and Los Angeles-based abstract artist William Bradley displays new paintings. Where his practice continues to examine the painted depiction of painterly codes, this new body of work looks increasingly towards digital intervention, such as Photoshop, as a tool for the manipulation of these codes.