London Paint Club is pleased to present, Selects: Vol. 1, our inaugural hybrid physical + online exhibition, showcasing 8 Contemporary Painters on view from 13 January to 24 February, 2022.
Selects: Vol. 1 is an exciting assemblage of eight dynamic contemporary artists all of whom have been selected based on their original artistic statements and artwork which reflects today’s social issues of concern to both artists and, frankly, to all of us. The artists chosen for our new physical exhibition are: Thomas Cameron, Hannah Murgatroyd, Christina Niederberger, Arthur Poujois, Marc Prats, Emerson Pullman, Sina-Sophia Schmidt and Jan Valik.
This exhibition reflects the concept that painting is a language – a language which communicates through visual expression what is real and what is abstract – and how themes of history, fantasy, and the ineffable subconscious speak this new language to explore contemporary reality.
Artists who live and work in the UK are prominently featured, highlighting the UK’s emergence as an international portal for the burgeoning wave of local and national visual artists/painters.
Recent times have demonstrated a critical need for flexibility in how contemporary artists disseminate artistic expression – towards that goal, London Paint Club has taken the lead in combining emerging technologies and digital platforms to assist artists. We are proud to spearhead this new exploration as the art world reinvents itself to meet current challenges. Art will always emerge throughout any societal challenge – war, censorship, and, now, a global pandemic which has affected all who breathe and all who see. London Paint Club is determined to provide innovation and leadership for artists to thrive during these challenging times.
In parallel with the opening of Selects: Vol. 1, Hannah Murgatroyd will drop her latest digital landscape painting on the NFT platform SuperRare. The digital piece will be viewable at 253 Hoxton Street for the duration of the physical exhibition, and available to buy only as an unique NFT via timed auction on SuperRare launching January, 14th 2022.
London Paint Club is grateful to the London art community for its unwavering support of both our physical exhibitions and currently existing online exhibitions. This community support ensures that we can continue to innovate and create new ways in which artists can enjoy a symbiotic relationship with others in the art community; this symbiosis achieves the dual goals of both promoting the UK art scene and allowing the public to enjoy/benefit from art in increasingly positive and healthy ways. To our local artists and gallerists, we give inestimable thanks for your continued support as London Paint Club continues to expand and develop our vision for the future.
Artists
Thomas Cameron
Hannah Murgatroyd
Christina Niederberger
Arthur Poujois
Marc Prats
Emerson Pullman
Sina-Sophia Schmidt
Jan Valik
“My paintings stem from an interest in the scenes that often go overlooked due to their familiarity. I am drawn to fleeting moments which have an ambiguity and understated quality to them. I think of my paintings as stills from a film – small parts of a bigger story with a suggestion of narrative.”
“Cameron presents snapshots of life with dramatic, thoughtful and colourful panache. It’s not about size and spectacle; it’s about an intimate look through his worldview.” — Rhys Fullerton
Characterised by subtle layers of light and colour, the filigree-like paintings and drawings of Hannah Murgatroyd centre on figures, structures and landscapes inspired by sources both ancient, modern and, yet to-exist. Moving within a circular narrative of large and small-scale paintings, her mise-en-scène of single figure, multi-peopled and unpeopled compositions pivot between interior and exterior worlds, open to the dual possibilities of abstraction and representation.
Born in Bristol, 1976, and raised on Dartmoor, Hannah lives and works in Bath, UK. A graduate of the Royal College of Art (2005) and the Royal Drawing School (2006), she is a mentor for Turps Art School. Shortlisted for the Contemporary British Painting Prize 2021, recent shows in 2021 include ‘Dreamlands: Part 1’ at OHSH Projects, UK; ‘From can see to can’t see – Digital Landscapes’, a curated NFT exhibition on the virtual platform SuperRare; and ‘Hawks in her Hair’ at Alice Black Gallery, UK.
“I am interested in the language of painting, how this language has been framed by its cultural conditions, art history and traditional notions of the masculine and feminine.”
For several years I have explored these interests with paintings that deal with re-interpretations of modernism’s vocabulary by ‘translating’ modernist stylistic devices into an illusionistic mark making which mimics embroidery/textiles. These paintings evoke the sphere of craft and design whilst their formal characteristics and rendition in oils allude to the domain of fine art.
During the first lockdown and influenced by the story of Penelope in the Odyssey, especially by Homer’s use of her weaving as a metaphor for the passing of time and female empowerment, I started to focus on paintings depicting woven patterns. At the same time I began to work quasi in reverse: rather than reworking modernism into paintings that look like textiles I started to remake the textile designs by women from the Bauhaus weaving workshop as paintings. Borrowing from both the vocabulary of modernism and of textile art, my painterly translations from one visual language to another can be read as hybrid texts engaged in a process of interpretation between languages and cultures, between modernism and contemporary art, between painting and textile as well as between a masculine culture viewed from a feminine perspective.
Arthur Poujois
The hour between dog
an wolf, growing symmetry, 2021
Oil and Thames mud on canvas
167 x 182 cm
“My drawings are a succinct following of transient moments that allow me to express my inner pulses. A semblance of autopoiesis: it is a matter of looking with concentration. Looking actively, with one’s hand, with all one’s energy. To let oneself be absorbed by the duration of the gaze which continues after the event to spread in the soul. Looking as writing, marking time with its internal rhythm.”
“My practice uses the narrative quality of painting to explore the subliminal space between psychology and digital technology. With my work, I flesh out and subvert generational anxieties caused by the pervasive impact of smart devices and social media on the human psyche.”
“Millennials are perhaps the last generation to grow up in a world without ubiquitous technologies. Thus, while we can still remember ‘simpler times’ with a certain sense of nostalgia, my generation is also able to understand, navigate and participate in the latest technological developments with ease. Arguably, these circumstances allow us millennials to take a step back from such phenomena, and assess their advantages and limitations more critically.
In that fashion, my paintings function both as products of the highly technological times we live in and as cautionary tales that attempt to counteract them. In my view, the physicality, slowness and history of painting as an artistic medium facilitate contemplation away from screens, away from the attention-grabbing algorithms that roam our digitized image-saturated culture to propagate content that fosters a superficial form of entertainment. Perhaps counter-intuitively, then, I combine digital collage aesthetics with gestural marks in search of a more enthralling journey than a kitten-filled Instagram reel. Namely, a series of intertwined painted stories that straddle analogue and digital worlds, to take my experience with technology as a starting point and discuss pivotal questions on life in the 21st century.”
“The depiction of a figure in a scene is used as a starting point for imagining the deeper reality of what is being represented and used as a framework to explore themes of introspection and mortality.”
Emerson Pullman is a figurative painter who creates portraits that operate on the boundary between realism and abstraction. Often beginning with an initial drawing, he instinctively pushes forward by making marks and gestures using layers of transparent paint. The works draws inspiration from a variety of sources including Philip Guston’s abstract works and 16th century ‘non finito’ sculptures. Fascinated by the process and mechanics of painting, Pullman plays with this and leaves areas unpainted or over-painted and images left without them being entirely resolved.
Sina-Sophia Schmidt
There was a hole in my tire,
the accumulation of
ominous prophecies come to life, 2020
Oil and yarn on canvas
130 x 99 cm
“Things build up, momentum increases and then gets wiped out. Empty spaces leave silence before they are covered and fall back into recreational chaos.”
Composing layers of paintings that build up on top of one another, the works have a deep history underneath them. Sina’s work explores impermanence, the fleeting nature of everything in existence. Here, the practice of painting exemplifies the ravenous forces of life that push and pull, create and destroy. The death of an old image gives birth to the next one. Within Sina’s practice, painting is an attempt to create a physical constellation of the transient, the invisible that is slightly out of reach but we know is there. Stability is a dream, we can reach for it but we can never hold it. What’s left for us is the ability to find comfort and freedom in the futility of attempting, and allow this act to stand on its own legs.
Jan Valik
It All Will Come Back
and Collide in an Unexpected Way, 2021
Oil on canvas
122 x 91 cm
“My work is tangentially connected to the idea of landscape as a psychological space where the relationship between human perception and the landscape consists of complex ties but also of fine nuances.
I am deeply interested in the edge of perception where abstract and figurative inform each other, evoking a spatial and pictorial ambiguity, a tension of simultaneous presence and absence. Throughout the painting process, I balance and play with gestural traces and atmospheres of various spaces, experienced and imagined, which merge with fragments of sensory memories.
The contradictory experience of spatial fluidity, an indoors-outdoors duality, stillness and shifting locations are ideas which fascinate me as I create. I want my work to invoke this and to engage the spectator in this simultaneous action, one in which paint can be seen both for its intrinsic properties and for its ability to imply fictive spaces. The dialogue oscillates back and forth between evocation and abstract traces that are open for interpretation. For me, painting becomes a way of existence, both as an activity and an object.”
