Michaela Ridgway

About

BRIGHTON-BASED ARTIST TO UNVEIL EXPERIMENTAL LIFE DRAWING THAT IS LONGER THAN A LONDON BUS 

The image of nude figures by Brighton-based artist Michaela Ridgway will be unveiled at Gallery 40 on the evening of Tuesday August 20th at 6 pm. The 1m x 10m drawing -  just over the length of a London bus - is titled ‘Now,’ and explores the experience of scale, pace, vitality and time.

The exhibition will also feature exciting new framed and unframed paintings on canvas, cartridge paper, mdf board, and brown paper bags. She paints both from life and from photos taken on an old Holga camera. Images in the exhibition include the Venezuelan ‘Devil dancers’ of Chuao, a prickly pear cactus under a setting sun, imagined landscapes, her kitchen sink, and a blue headless nude.

She paints figures, landscapes, and figures in landscapes that hover somewhere between the abstract and the real. Colour is a particular preoccupation of her work and the paintings are bold and unburdened by ego or fancy footwork.

“Doing this drawing, I had to move forwards and backwards through space and - in some unfathomable way - through time. It‘s like time travel.”

“Michaela Ridgway’s images balance bold, spare human drama with a frail, unfinished state of becoming. Her devotion to practice and process gives her work a mystique, an internal contradiction, that makes it compelling and timeless.” Rachel Spence, Art Critic, Financial Times