Pontone Gallery is delighted to announce the assimilation of its long-standing partner, and predecessor, The Albemarle Gallery. This will bring a wide variety of distinguished artists under one roof and make for more effective promotion of such a wealth of creative talent.
This exhibition marks the occasion with a selection drawn from the gallery’s extensive list of international artists, including many previously exclusive to The Albemarle Gallery. The presentation focusses particularly on painting and features established artists alongside newer talents. With an emphasis on figuration, the viewer is invited to experience a wide and eclectic range of practice.
Richard Harrison offers richly-coloured and vigorously-handled, mystical landscapes; Harry Holland, enigmatic images of the female nude. Clive Head’s hallucinatory, layered scenarios of fractured figures make an amalgam of presence, memory and anticipation.
Christopher Thompson shows his brooding, chiaroscuro studies, while Philip Munoz, and Stuart Luke Gatherer use their finely-wrought and painterly facility to represent the human form.
Henry Jabbour’s paintings of fugitive and allusive figures are formed by sumptuous workings of textured oil. Kate Tedman makes graphic and embroidered interweavings of complex signs and symbols. Kyle Barnes contributes a surreal portrait head, slickly coated in a viscous fluid. Alberto Zamboni essays an atmospheric and lyrical approach to landscape.
Taiwanese painter Reef Hsu crafts painstaking accumulations of uniform, cellular, grain-shaped marks that combine to make a softly-modulated surface. Carefully-rendered colour articulates the shifting forms and masses of the compositions, prompting comparisons with the aesthetics of classical landscape painting.
Pontone’s Korean cohort, a long-term speciality of the gallery, is represented by two artists. Lee Jungwoong is a well-established and notable hyperrealist - his ‘brush’ painting is startling in its immediacy. Hwang Seontae is a sculptor of lightboxes that show scenes of harmonious order suffused by intimations of dystopian unease.
This exhibition is an opportunity to celebrate the heritage of The Albemarle Gallery and welcome its artists into a new home, one which promises a bold and exciting future.
