No Rushing for Warmth

About

Please join us on Thursday, 15 April from 11am-9pm — Bookings for the Opening, as well as for a visit during the exhibition can be made here, or via the gallery website.

Rithika Pandey is a painter of richly coloured figurative paintings that are born from being a cultural nomad. She grew up in a family that moved between many places in India and Africa before spending time in the UK for her studies, providing her with a remarkable collection of impressions, colours and a unique vibrancy that bring her paintings to life. 

Outsiders must always first observe, before being able to join, interpreting signs and habits in order to understand how to become part of a new culture. What is so very fascinating and rewarding about Rithika Pandey’s collected observations is that she swims in the mysterious, celebrating and defying collected symbols and experiences, somehow achieving a unified culture of otherness, spiritual hieroglyphs as well as characters.

Dreamlike narratives conjure dramas and mysticisms that feel at once archeological and fantastical. Joyful plays of colour bring us to the ‘warmth’ of the title — those summer days of abandon, unaware of the ease of the warmth of the day. These are paintings reflecting the heat and full sunlight upon a world singularly conjured from the subconscious mixtures and enigmas that can never be fully understood, yet joyfully exhibited. Rithika embraces how loudly she receives these collected experiences and endeavours to interpret and depict this very blissful confusion.

Rithika Pandey (b. 1998 Varanasi, India) is a contemporary visual artist from Mumbai. Being a recent graduate from Carmarthen School of Art, her nomadic practice situates her between her home in India and the UK. Recent shows include The Past is Foreign Place, solo show at Arcade Campfa, Cardiff 2021, MADE IT 2020, Short Supply MCR, Barbican Arts group Trust, Artworks Open 2020, London 2020 for which she was also the recipient of their first prize and Drawing is dead, Studio Khirki, Delhi 2018.

The excitement of the long awaited re-opening of the gallery can not be overstated: celebrating two remarkable women with solo exhibitions (Rithika Pandey: No Rushing for Warmth and Veronika Neukirch: Void—scaping). Unit 1 Gallery | Workshop is proud to be opening its doors with a ‘double’ experience and the opportunity to see the works of two dynamic and brave female practices exploring world making from highly contrasting viewpoints. 

A painter and a sculptor investigating and excavating the worlds they inhabit to better understand themselves and others.   Veronika Neukirch confronts the universe with the philosopher’s eye and a child’s spirit; Rithika Pandey deciphers symbols and rituals, cultural mysteries and formulates them anew.  

The two exhibitions will reward the viewer with two worlds, two views to world making, interpreting and navigating as well as reflecting. Both artists have invented characters allowing you into the works yet confounding interpretation. The humour and playfulness within both Rithika’s and Veronika’s works are gentle doorways providing an entrance into layers of profundity.

About Unit 1 Gallery | Workshop and the Workshop Foundation:

Unit 1 Gallery | Workshop is an exhibition and residency space in London and unique in its approach to bringing artists and their practices to the public. They support a diverse range of emerging and mid-career contemporary artists by providing them with space and time to develop their practice, network within our growing community, be mentored by team members and crucially be introduced to their expansive network of collectors, art educators, professionals and visitors. 

Through their residency programmes and exhibitions, they give artists, curators and theorists a platform to present work and share ideas as well as creating an environment for freethinking and exchange. 

They have now organised more than 40 exhibitions with over 120 artists and curators, with 10 exhibitions and 25 artists in residence a year, drawing in international audiences and participants, as well as being a local landmark in the community of Kensington and Chelsea and its surrounds.

Unit 1 Gallery | Workshop was founded in 2015 by artist Stacie McCormick in a former builder’s merchant.