Works on Paper & Abstract Art | 10th – 21st May
Here Falls The Shadow
10th – 21st May 2023
Preview Night: 10th May, 6:00 – 8:30pm
Open:
10am – 6pm Monday to Saturday
12 – 6pm Sunday
Here Falls The Shadow
Taking the title from the TS Eliot poem, ‘Here Falls the Shadow’ features a range of artists from across the globe who explore the space between an idea and its reality.
10th May – 21st May 2023
Coma Yank
Born in Siberia, then studied Fine Arts at University of Saint Petersburg. In 2022 had to leave Russia, currently residing in Uzbekistan.
I would like to introduce you to my ‘Dreams and Realities’ collection. In this collection I have used mixed media to achieve what I hope are astonishing results.
In developing collections I aim to maintain fluidity as an artist. I feel it is important not to set boundaries. I don’t do sketches; this is because I love spontaneity. I often write down words and phrases before I start painting. This helps create a particular mood and helps to create an image; it is also, perhaps why I often include words and poetry in my work.
Using different textures and techniques I have combined watercolor, pastel paints, color pencils, markers and ink creating a fusion which correlates well with my concept of ‘dreams and realities’ This fusion represents the transition between life and death, conscious and unconscious and multi dimensions.The element of ‘Dreams’ is conceived from our experiences of dreaming. We cannot remember the whole dream, we can only remember tantalizing moments. For me dreams have colour and possibility, whereas reality is black and white. This is why I have combined both painting and drawing techniques in this instance. The element of ‘Realities’ in the collection is inspired by the possibility that multilayered realities exist. I aim to show these realities without losing the atmosphere of the dreamlike state. This challenges the observer to ask the question; What is a dream and what is reality? and do they sometimes become entwined?
Janick
@ancreduchatbleu
A word from the artist:
“Fascinated by the Human being and everything that it silently represents, I’m feeding during my walks of what we can feel about a look, the way that a person behave in space, the sound of a voice that even with a tired laugh let knows a silent and deep pain.
It is not conscious, but I have the feeling to be like a negative analog picture and my work like a developer where a sheet is diving and an echo appears, perceiving what I felt through the eye of others.
I never draw from a model, but always alone in my studio. It takes a lot of works for me to get a painting done as a lot of tries are tears up because I do not trust on me.
I do not like to lock myself on only one technic and use different medias, listening to their exigences, mysteries and opposite them. It allows me to discover new effects and it improves my painting knowledge.
As I’m exigent on myself, I always try to grow up and understand the different chemical effect on mixtures.
Currently, I’m painting on wood and canvas.
I like to work on old mixtures inspired from major Italian Renaissance artists and to make colors with pigments.
Mercurial Pearl
@mercurialpearl
all that’s left are the textures in my head.
London based (with a heart in many places) MERCURIAL PEARL expresses her love of textures and fascination with composition through collage.
What started as arranging bowls of fruit as a child, developed into composing abstract textures, forms and colors into worlds of shimmering chaos.
MERCURIAL PEARL finds great freedom in extracting from an image what she finds beautiful and combining it with something that has nothing to do with it.
“We rely so much on context to appreciate what is before us – let’s simulate escape through shape.”
MERCURIAL PEARL(s)
The artist asked herself: what would a “mercurial pearl” look like? Created on CD’s, the casing allows the owner to rotate the visual as they’d like to see it on the wall.
Liquid Poems
MERCURIAL PEARL is honoured to release her first collection of poems. The concept book was created in collaboration with Valentina Castro Valdez, a multidisciplinary designer. The final piece is, in fact, a block of prints which can also be displayed.
Sofya Tagor
@sofyatagor
Sofya is a multimedia artist who combines drawing, painting and film. She explores the theme of displacement through her own experience of living between two countries. The work captures a feeling of placelessness and mourning for the impossibility of a return. Her family immigrated to Scotland in 2009. It was caused, among other reasons, by the political climate in Russia and the ever-growing authoritarian regime in the country.
The compositions stem from Sofya’s old childhood photos taken by her parents and memories of her home in Russia. However, these photos act as a starting point for the works but are not the subject. By juxtaposing objects, animals, birds and people together, she explores displacement and ambiguity in the pieces. The depicted landscape is never a particular place, rather something imaginary or dreamlike. Sofya invites the viewer to find connections with her characters and perhaps, construct their own narrative.
Sofya Tagor (b. 1997 Moscow, Russia) is based in Glasgow, Scotland. She graduated from Gray’s School of Art with BA(Hons) in Fine Art – Painting. She has held solo and group shows in New York, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Tallinn and Berlin.
\About the works:
Nowhere Near (where we are supposed to be)
This work is based on a place that is very important to me and is somewhere I haven’t been to for a long time. It is my family dacha on the outskirts of Moscow. The depicted landscape is ambiguous with no specific signs of a certain place. The kids in the image are alert but playful at the same time. They were out walking and came across an old, deserted house. In the image I question the possibility of my family’s return home and how it would affect these places if they had to be abandoned.
Холоднее (Colder)
‘On the sunset it gets Colder’ – is an ongoing series of pieces that depicts a ‘post-apocalyptic’ backdrop of suburban Moscow tower blocks. These images usually portray youth attempting to continue with the normality in this new environment they were unwilinngly placed in. Thinking back on works such as Akira by Katsuhiro Otomo, with the real threat of nuclear war by the Russian government, I look at how severe anxiety of these events impacts the youth, not just in Russia but all over the world.
The composition partly came from imagination and partly from a scene I witnessed back in Moscow. A mother was watching her baby daughter play with their large dog on a big pile of snow. The scene felt both playful and uncomfortable, with mother not particularly paying much attention to what her daughter is doing, rather the dog became her watchful guard. In the final piece the children are alert. With ‘That’s all folks’ graffitied on the building and the tall, abandoned block of flats, I again want to deliver a message of severity of war, destruction and loss of home.
Party Boy
‘Party Boy’ is originally a photo of my brother’s birthday party. On the photo he is the only one who looks unhappy, pointing at his presents and friends that are sitting in front of him. Peculiar and slightly sinister atmosphere looms around the boy. I wanted the image to have a dream-like effect with slight sadness depicted in the boys’ eyes.
Lilith Divine
@lilithdivineartist
A word from the artist:
There is no longer happy history in the relationship between man and nature. It is distorted, altered by myopia and embarrassing haughtiness. Yet you cannot break the flow of a kind of perpetual motion that surrounds in the same eternal grip, life of the planet and of humanity. In my paintings emerge clearly as the contortion of a natural relationship, has become painful and dystopian. I try to narrate that ancient and future research, to recover the primordial coexistence of living beings in a world of men who tried to kill me. In my oil paintings, powerful anthropomorphic figures, tangle in vigorous hugs, thither where jellyfish float in the sky like saving angels or skulls denounce degradation and corruption, the impending tragedy. Anthropomorphic figures with animal skulls replace the head and focus attention on human damage to the animal world…. The plastics in the ocean, the garbage everywhere, intensive breeding, light pollution, and so much more… and this is not commercial rhetoric, it’s my damned suffering that I feel every day in a sick world. I try to improve everyday day in a never ending story made of much practice, experiments (now I’m producing my oil colors with old pigments from 50 years ago), so much humility, dedication, pride and dirty hands stinking of turpentine and safflower oil. I shout my message to the world. That world that as a child made me suffer a lot, but that underneath still has something wonderful to tell… keeping alive the dream of living with my art.
I was born in the mountains of North Italy in 1976. “First, I was a self-taught artist. Then I graduated with full marks in 2001 at the Albertina Academy of Fine Arts in Turin, Italy. When I didn’t have the money for even one colour, I crushed a flower, a leaf and a brick, mixed them with water to make watercolours, and drew.
Creating something that could make another person happy gave me a piece of energy. I understood that the gift that was given to me couldn’t die with me, but that it had to be cultivated. And that – I – saved my life. Many times.
Jo Matei Art
@jo_matei_art
A word from the Artist:
Through my art I explore the contrast, I celebrate and promote acceptance and I
encourage diversity. My paintings aim to empower the viewer in their journey
toward self-discovery reminding them that darkness applies to all human beings.
My artistic research is ultimately a celebration of the subconscious and an
invitation to scout our silenced instincts as a source of unexplored energy.
Begum Ko
@begumkoo
A word from the artist:
I’m Begum Ko, an art director who loves exploring themes like self-awareness, intimacy, and humanity’s relationship with the world through my art. My work reflects the duality of creation and destruction, using bold colours and chaotic finishes to scrape attention to the destructive actions of humans. My artworks also reflect my dry sense of humour and childlike perspective, as well as my personal moods and beliefs.
Nic Cowper
@niccowper
Nic is a self-taught British artist and teacher majoring in watercolour. Creative aspiration is “Abstract Impressionism” or pushing to the point of abstraction. Light plays its part. He also works acrylics, oils, digital and pencil, but only teaches watercolour and acrylics.
Based on England’s south coast, inspiration is often that which is easily found: trees and seas. But for this show the work has been curated around the idea of cities and people. My intention is always to evoke the feeling of the subject, not the detail, allowing the medium to lead me. The change of subject impacts and the results feel like a new direction for me.
Eva Christina Bergmann
@evachristinabergmann
A word from the artist:
Eva Christina Bergmann is based in Düsseldorf, Germany. She has studied fine arts and teaches art. Since 2021 participation in international art exhibitions, e.g. Artio Gallery Carrousel du Louvre (Paris), M.A.D.S. ART GALLERY, ARTBOX.PROJECT World 2.0, and in Cologne: The Stage Gallery, Kunstbunker, K49.
Her high contrast, colour-intense and abstract works are created out of a passion and love for art. Her works reflects the artist’s longing for freedom, movement and vitality, and captivate with their high-quality brilliance of colour, structure and contrast.
The expressive works are mood setters and at home everywhere. They can stimulate the viewer’s imagination and likewise create one’s own inner mood images to bring oneself into harmony with lived reality. Art leads to us, it is the path to the soul. Art is love.
The Brick Lane Gallery
216 Brick Lane | London | E1 6SA
Phone: +44 (0) 207 729 9721
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