Hannah Luxton: In the Garden of the Sun

About

In the Garden of the Sun presents a wilderness across two windows, one at dawn and one at dusk - the Earth’s most enchanting times of day. The work is inspired by Icelandic landscapes and Luxton’s enduring influences of Art Nouveau and Alphonse Mucha’s Times of Day lithographs, and the natural symmetry employed through painting history to convey a sense of omnipotent power over the land. The installation is an expanded painting featuring motifs, techniques and textures found in Luxton’s linen paintings. A puddle-shaped mirror sits on a carpet of moss and lichen, and arches drift in the sky as portals from one unknown world to another.

Luxton makes paintings, drawings and installations inspired by the geological sublime, and the Romantic notion that the divine is located within raw nature. Lifting organic and ethereal subjects from the natural world, she reduces them into a minimalist language of motifs, giving the paintings an emotive core that is elemental, yet fragile and fleeting. With a natural empathy for Eastern philosophical notions of the void, she uses naked linen to give substance and significance to ‘nothingness’. Luxton’s works are dreamlike, slowing time and eluding direct interpretation. In their ambiguity, they activate imagination and transport us beyond the physical boundaries of human time and space.

About Hannah Luxton

Hannah Luxton (b. London, 1986) works from her secluded studio within Epping Forest, North London. She graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art MA (2012) and Kingston University, Fine Art BA (2008). Luxton has undertaken many artist residencies and expeditions that bring her closer to the geological formations of the natural world and the natural sublime. Notably, in spring 2019 she embarked on a three month research trip across Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and southern California to explore the wilderness of western America. In 2018 she completed a research trip to the north of Iceland, after first discovering the country through The Fljotstunga Travel Farm Residency, Iceland Award in 2015. Previous to this she was awarded the Trélex Residency, Switzerland (2013).

Luxton has exhibited widely in London in solo and group exhibitions at Glass Cloud Gallery (solo), London (2020); Lumen, London (2019); ArthouSE1, London (2019); Drawing Room Gallery, London (2018); Blank 100 (solo) London (2018); Lily Brooke Gallery, London (2016); Bankley Gallery, Manchester (2016); The Barbican Arts Group Trust (solo) London (2016); 44AD, Bath (2014) and Frameless Gallery, London (2013). She has exhibited internationally at Midnight Gallery, Los Angeles (2018) and Corridor Projects, Ohio (2016) USA, Boecker Contemporary, Heidelberg Germany (2016); Galleria M, Kolkata, India (2015), and the Fljotstunga Travel Farm, Iceland (2015). Prizes and awards include the Contemporary British Painting Prize (shortlist) (2019), The Denton’s Art Prize (shortlist) (2019); Arts Council England Project Grant (2018); The Creekside Open, APT Gallery, London (2017); the Betty Malcolm Scholarship for Stage and Decorative Painting (2012) and the Painter Stainers Bursary (2011).