SUMMER DREAM

About

Mercer Chance is proud to present SUMMER DREAM, a joyous meeting of two talented young contemporary painters. Madness, beauty, mystery and humour colour this strange new world of intuitive image making.

In this new series of paintings Katie Brookes has used imagination to bypass her observational work and focus on colour and composition, working along the themes of stereotypical British culture, seaside and leisure in the summertime.

Focused on the material qualities of paint and the pure enjoyment of colour, these new works explore exaggerated British-ness now. These bold and ironic escapist fantasies first appeared while Katie was on a rainy residency in Scotland, but they have become a promising avenue for a richly inventive studio practice going forward. In September she will attend the Turps Banana painting school, where she hopes to make her paintings “bigger and more... mad”.

Katie Brookes grew up in Belgium, studied at Camberwell College of Art and the Royal Drawing School, and now lives and works in London.

Elizabeth McCarten's recent work explores the idea of a dream evoked by real places being re-presented. When we dream we recycle images and experiences that we have had that day, week or a thought that has been on our mind. Our mind breaks these experiences down and reconstructs them into a series of new images, thoughts and sensations. Working directly from observation, she gathers information before deconstructing and breaking down the image to lyrical lines and marks. Her dream-like colour washes serve as emotional responses to the landscape which is used as a means to recreate a world where imagination and reality can merge together in the freedom of paint. Scenes are reduced to shapes and colours that evoke darkness and light, that invite the viewer to see differently into a landscape of possibilities.

Elizabeth McCarten is a painter with a strong interest in light and space, and in particular developing her understanding of the semiotics of seeing. Elizabeth studied Fine Art (Painting) at the University of Brighton before completing the Postgraduate programme at The Royal Drawing School. Elizabeth lives and works in London.