HelenA Pritchard: 2

About

HelenA Pritchard: 2 is the first solo presentation of new work at 1961 by South African artist HelenA Pritchard. 

The exhibition brings together sculptures, paintings, assemblages and site-specific installations as a means to reflect the playfulness and depth of Pritchard’s practice. Her work draws imagery from architectural details of monolithic structures to shapes of lawns and swimming pools, packaging and advertising graphics.

Born in South Africa and living in London, Pritchard’s work is shaped by cultural contrasts. Her work is a synthesis of form and material articulated through a language of the everyday, iconic pop elements, Dada, Arte Povera and Modernism. These relations between domestic consumerism and corporate systems find playful dualities that place culture to question. These dualities whether formal or contextual are intuitive and considered within the work. Drawing from an inventory of bought and found material, Pritchard exploits and elevates the extrinsic values of these unusual materials. Canvas made with fabric commonly used in embroidery and painted with a traditional gesso technique of mixing whiting and rabbit skin glue is used in a defunct way, a critiquing of what Pritchard describes as “Woman’s Work”, a title also used for a series of her sculptural compositions. 

One gets a feeling that the work is constantly evolving. Structures are stretched and un-stretched, and then reassembled again. Collections of components are left, at times for years in the studio as it allows time for it to be informed by new work and discoveries. The found elements are reinvented into new processes of transcendence embedded with histories and brought to contrast, a way of looking to the past and enquiring into the given.