Taymour Grahne Projects (Notting Hill) – Group show curated by 106 Green Gallery: Still Going
Taymour Grahne projects is proud to present Still Going, a group show curated by 106 Green Gallery, NY. The show features nine artists based or showing in New York. All of the works reflects an understated stillness in painting, as the title also plays on the decade long existence of the small artist run gallery, started in Brooklyn. The exhibition will be hosted by Taymour Grahne Projects at our Notting Hill gallery, 1 Lonsdale Road and opens on Saturday 22 January, from 10am – 6pm, as part of a socially distanced viewing across our 3 spaces.
It could be said that all paintings are still, despite being born out of movement. This selection focuses on works that reference stillness directly, scenes from life, the daily observed. This sense of quiet is heightened through the touch, time, and consideration of painting. With varied approaches and pace, the artists ask us to reflect upon their own contemplations and processes.
As with much contemporary painting, artists in this show find new life in historical genres and themes. Alessandro Teoldi’s cast still life scenes feel intimate and soft, despite being poured from concrete. With hints of Morandi, they are tactile and uncolored, in the way that a dream might be. Padma Rajendran’s joyous odes to the still life are painted with dye and polyester on shaped silk. Her images swim with dense color and pattern, evoking a sense of liveliness and warmth. Alexandria Tarver’s elegant and reserved paintings of flowers float both above and below the picture plane, perhaps in direct relation to the transitory nature of her still life subject.
Several of the artists play within an imaginary space, conjuring ideas of a surrealist uncanny. Veronika Pausova overlays precisely rendered objects onto abstracted backgrounds – textured shapes and fields, resulting in unfamiliar scenes where a strange event is about to unfold. Philip Hinge’s fictional spaces featuring bananas, cats, and still life fruits spring from his personal interest and daily life. Spun though his unique filter they are charged and unnerving. Sarah Pater’s paintings, more clearly indebted to the still life genre, place minimal elements onto table tops floating in mysterious spaces, banded by color- her deadpan clarity recalling the silence of Magritte.
Allusions to the camera lens and media rest beneath the surface in some of the work. Matthew Zaccari frames his scenes from daily life within swaths of flat color. The deftly made images float within the plane of paint, held there, like poetic recollections of iphone snapshots. Japeth Mennes creates flat, pop images of the urban banal: apartment mailboxes, commercial washing machines, open windows, intercom systems. Painted with lines of bright color, often in contrast to pale greys and beiges, they serve as beacons from the geometry of city life. Ellen Siebers’ paintings of images of historical paintings, nestled within gauzy flowers are made with delicate quick strokes, imbuing her contemporary collage sensibility with a flickering light and impressionistic touch.
106 Green was founded in 2009 in Mitchell Wright’s Brooklyn apartment with his friends Holly Coulis and Ridley Howard. The gallery has operated casually since that time, and now resides in a small space in Manhattan’s Chinatown. The primary focus has been building a sense of community and creating opportunities for young artists.
