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Finding\Form


  • no format Gallery Arklow Road London, England United Kingdom (map)

Finding\Form

Private View - Wednesday 25th September, 6-9pm. All welcome. 

Open daily 12-6pm - 24.09.24 - 29.09.24

Meet the artists with drinks Saturday 28th, 2-5pm

We all work in different ways but are all interested in exploring the dynamic interplay between the intuitive/spontaneous gestures and interaction with materials and the more intentional planned aspects of making work. I think we’ve bought together a really exciting collection of paintings!

Curated by Sara Breinlinger and Stephen Keane

Artists 

Sara Breinlinger

Dan Broughton

Katya Derksen

Stephen Keane

Johanna Melvin

Julian Scott

Gesture has always been present in painting as an inevitable consequence of the process of painting itself. Paint placed on a surface retains evidence of the method of its application. With the advent of non-representational or “abstract” painting, artists began to understand that the mark and the gesture could carry meaning in their own right and, in so doing, become their own subject matter.

This raises other issues, of course. Perhaps the notion of the abstract expressionist gesture as emotion, passion, or expression now seems like only one possibility, and one to which we may no longer aspire. Contemporary abstract painting often takes a more provisional, less absolute, negotiated position between intention and chance, improvisation and planning, and even success and failure. It is this dichotomy that we will explore in this exhibition.

The show reflects ongoing conversations about these issues and explores possibilities in abstraction related to the ways in which gestures or marks become meaning. To this end, the artists, through expressive gestural abstraction or more hard-edged works, playfully subvert traditional conventions and explore the dynamic interplay between the intuitive/spontaneous and the planned/designed. Individual works might arise from a spontaneous interaction with materials and surface, only to develop intention as they evolve, or the exact opposite might be the case, where a plan is subverted by impulse and instinct. Often, a painting will iterate between both of these.

no format gallery

Casting house, Moulding Lane, (Off Arklow Road), London SE14 6BN

Nearest Stations (New Cross / New Cross Gate and Deptford)

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