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Adrian Wiszniewski 03 Feb - 25 Feb 2012 Adrian Wiszniewski paints poetic yet idiosyncratic visions. Big pictures with big impact. Colourful fantasies of sunlit brilliance, overflowing patterns of people and panthers, mythic birds and beasts, the bright beauty of star flowers, trumpet lilies, chalice gold ranunculus, feathery green fronds, furled flags, midnight skinny dipping, and throngs of handsome, poised boys and girls, all, like Dorian Gray, eternally young.
Clementine McGaw: Bare Life 03 Feb - 25 Feb 2012 Clementine McGaw was born in London in 1988, where she continues to live and work. She trained at Central St. Martins, graduating in 2010 with a BA in Fine Art. In 2010, she won the award for 'Best Emerging Fine Artist’ as awarded by Saatchi & Saatchi.
This series of paintings explores the reality of the human body and its suffering, voicing the artist’s preoccupation with the human impulse to exert our own dominance over ‘life’.
McGaw’s work draws on many influences – visual and otherwise. Though moved by the human suffering inherent in all conflict, McGaw is particularly inspired by the work of Italian philosopher Georgio Agamben, and his theories on what he terms ‘bare life’. For Agamben, this is a form of human existence exiled from the protection of the law, where a person is forced to live as a mere body rather than as a politically entitled citizen. Each of McGaw’s isolated figures are an attempt to express this state and evoke a sense of the accompanying emptiness and deprivation.
Beginning from photographs, McGaw feels that this gives her the very best opportunity to truly study the human form. Working then in oil paints, she uses the paint as a new language – translating the image and allowing her to record a new interpretation of her subject. In utilising the language of paint in this way, McGaw believes she can re-humanise her subjects within these new, transformed works.
Expressing the universality of suffering, McGaw’s paintings almost never include the human portrait. Faceless and nameless, her figures relate to the viewer on the most intimate level.
McGaw a cites a strong connection to the work of Francis Bacon, having an ongoing captivation with his efforts to paint the definitive human cry. As with Bacon, McGaw tries devotedly and painstakingly to paint the true essence of human suffering - as an emotion rather than a narrative.
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Wen Wu: Decadence & Beauty 03 Feb - 25 Feb 2012 WEN WU was born in Qingdao, China in 1978. She has a BA in Fine Art from Tsinghua University’s Academy of Art and Design, and an MA in Fine Art from London Metropolitan University. She has exhibited extensively in London, as well as in Beijing and Seoul, and her painting ‘Venus as a Boy’ was a selected entry in this years BP Portrait Award. Wu describes her artist’s instinct as one ‘obsessed with beauty’. Her gift for capturing the sensuous and exquisite - coupled with her unique painting style and bold use of colour - creates seductive, innovative compositions. This unique aesthetic is formed, in part, by Wu’s extensive spectrum of inspirations, which curates and combines a careful assortment of figurative imagery from various cultures and periods. Having trained as a painter from a very young age, Wu possesses a superb technical brilliance. The flesh and material in her compositions is always lively and touchable; at once inviting and yet enigmatic. Wu has described her painting as not simply the vehicle through which she represents her ideas, but also the means through which she discovers herself. It is this personal adventure which gives her works their individuality; Wu combines beauty and sensuality with a flash of personality - a vivacity - which is as rare as it is captivating.
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