About
Stuffs encompasses the intrigue of medium, blurring the formalised boundaries within painting and sculpture. This group show of emerging artists takes the curiosities of material as a drive to exploit their physicality, unearthing a narrative of human nature, experience and beauty.
With a prominent reliance on medium, Emma Taylor creates sculptures exploring the properties of materials such as wood and metal. Playing with their simplistic qualities focusing on their density, weight and the ephemeral qualities of their simple beauty. Taylor places this approach to material in relation to the idea of play, identifying where the hazy boundaries between interaction and an artwork can exist. Concerns with interaction are echoed in Cyrus Shroff's paintings, which stand as the residues of deep engagement and deliberations with oil paint and crucially a pleasure when working with the medium. Built up of surfaces and archetypal forms, the paintings communicate through a physical, sensory exchange, while exposing their corporeal, material history. Refusing to aspire to a specific visual dialect, the work moves impatiently within a set of personal painterly parameters that keep the work in the realm of the figurative as we experience them. The paint emotes as it comes to play a central part in the viewers sensation of the work.
Placing the medium at the forefront for interrogation poses questions of its ideal within the discourse of art. Raymonde Beraud's paintings place âthe human' as a main theme, reflecting on personal questions of human nature and experience and inner feelings. The work alludes to the figurative, however Beraud treats her medium in a similar manner, exploiting its physical form, transparency and colour, forming a representation of a human inner dimension of its own. This treatment of paint is taken on in Sarah Tew's work; however, with a concentration on the process, visualisations of the body's interaction with the physicality of paint are presented to the viewer, attempting to expose the hierarchy in which paint is placed as a material in culture. The nature of painting is stripped down to the baseness of human expression, inner experience, and instinct, taking painting beyond figurative representation and into a space where paint is juxtaposed to the flesh of the human.
With the ideals of painting and the concern of medium as a tool for representation constantly being questioned within the collective of works, Jumpei Kinoshita's work uses this framework of ideals within paint, concerned with beauty and colour, and most importantly illustrating the richness and sumblimity within a painting. Kinoshita follows a formal process of selecting colours, colour order and layering to explore the nature of pigment, constructing surfaces which present the viewer with a literal screen, drawing attention to its beauty.
Stuffs incorporates the work of current students from The Slade School of Art, Goldsmiths and a recent graduate from Byam Shaw School of Art.
Please contact Sarah in regards to press and any other enquiries by calling 07909770874, or
email stuffs.exhibition@googlemail.com
