Winter

About

In this exhibition of new work, ArtCan member artists share their reactions, reflections and evocations of winter, the ‘marmite’ season. Works include paintings, drawings, and sculptures all responding to the theme in a wide variety of colour palettes and styles. 

Over the past two years, artists and patrons alike sorely missed the opportunity to experience art in person. This is particularly welcome in mid-winter, a time when our experiential and sensorial world can feel reduced. For this reason, ArtCan is especially pleased to be able to be mounting its first physical exhibition of 2022, including a private view*, at Kingsgate Project Space. This exhibition brings together the work of nearly 70 artists, sharing their enthusiasm, warmth and collective spirit. Finally, this large group show will be presented as a salon-style hanging, promising to kick start the new year with a sense of visual plenty.

Curators quote:

Our group of ArtCan artists have responded brilliantly to the theme ‘What does winter mean to you?’. Works range from snowy, winter scenes to bright, vibrant, abstracted shapes, thoughtful sculptures, solemn winter gaze and reminiscences of summer holidays.

The concept of the hang is a salon-style layout where the overall configuration resembles a broad-brush stroke, with each individual work responding to the theme.

The objective of this exhibition is to conjure up our collective energy to break up the solitude of the winter months.

About the Curator
KV Duong (b.1980 Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam) is a London-based artist with a practice that spans painting, sculpture, and performance. Duong grew up in Canada to Chinese Vietnamese parents displaced by the Vietnam War. In his work, he explores themes of migration and cultural assimilation through a re-examination of his parents’ and his own experiences. War trauma and integration correlate with the artist’s coming out as a gay, Asian man.

Duong creates imagined landscapes using various media such as historic Vietnam War images and documentation, his own body painting images, and found objects and materials that have personal significance. He retells a history that has been distorted through media censorship and displaced through passed-on experiences, and in so doing suggests a new psychological reality. The material surface is corrupted—ripped, scratched, painted over—to disrupt any simple representation. The traumatised surface of the final work responds to conflict and the altered effects of the original events of war migration and suppression of speech. In some works, perspective and scale are warped to create a tension between the object and subject relation.

Duong is a self-taught artist with a background in structural engineering. He has contributed to several juried competitions including Derwent Art Prize (2016), BBC’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition Programme (2019), Discerning Eye (2020), Royal Cambrian & Royal Ulster Academy Open (2021) and Barbican Arts Group Trust Open (2021).

The Artists
Amanda Blunden; Andrea C Morley; Ángel Castillo Perona; Anil Mistry; Cat Coulter; Catalina Christensen; Catherine Sweet; Chloe Scott-Moncrieff; Claire Cansick; Claire Chandler; Emma Hill; Emmanuelle Orr; Fran Fell; Henryk Terpilowski; Hilary Anne Rosen; Ian Butcher; Jess de Zilva; Sal Jones; Jose Zalabardo; Judith Burrows; Juli Fejer; Julie Brixey Williams; Katherine Filice; Kira Phoenix K'inan; Laura Fishman; Laura Gompertz; Laura Parker; Laura Pedley; Laurence Causse-Parsley; Lawrence Mathias; Linda C Burrows; Lisa Price; Liz Whiteman Smith; Melanie Jordan; Meriliis Rinne; Molly Lambourn; Nirali Patel; Rebecca Tucker; Rosha Nutt ; Sandra Menant; Sandy Layton; Sara Reeve; Sarah-Jayne Bird; Susannah Weiland; Svetlana Atlavina; Patricia Bidi; Maja Quille; Jeremy Morgan; Vanessa Short; Maria Kaleta; Teresa Zerafa Byrne; Sabatin Bascoban; Sally Burch; Adam Dobby; Brian Harris; Geraldine van Heemstra; Pernilla Iggstrom; Sarah Wills-Brown; Doris Ernst; Emma Copley; Andrew Leventis; Peter Mammes; Hannah Campion; Elizabeth Mikellides; Svetlana Grishina; Taya De La Cruz