Into The Light: New Talent at the Livery
Forthcoming exhibition
Overview
The Painter-Stainers’ Livery Company and Pontone Gallery are delighted to introduce ‘Into the Light’, an exhibition of painting and sculpture from newly-joined members of this ancient and prestigious organisation.
The Painter-Stainers, one of the great and oldest of the Guilds of London, can date its origins at least to 1283. Set up to protect and promote the interests of painters, stainers and associated decorators, the Company survives and flourishes today. Its core mission is to support the creative arts and art education in the City of London.
This exhibition features artists who have been admitted to the Company recently. It reflects a determined drive to recruit professional practitioners from a wide variety of backgrounds and disciplines from the contemporary art world. This is a sample of the deep well of talent on which the Company can draw.
Pontone Gallery and the Painter-Stainers’ Company both value the hard-won crafts of painting and sculpture. We see the acquisition and deployment of a profound understanding of technique as an exciting and visually sophisticated pathway to gripping outcomes. This cohort of artists, as various and conceptually divergent as they are, all hold this ideal in common, one shared by Pontone and its stable of artists.
Yuki Aruga paints floral motifs that unfurl themselves in a virtuoso display of acute observational skill. Her forensic depictions of natural forms are suffused with an expressive intensity that transcends the everyday.
Simon Bejer works up lyrical and wry scenarios that combine various kinds of disparate imagery. His slickly rendered pictures employ both Rococo and comic-book techniques to depict a world of ‘magical realism’.
Polly Bennett works across disciplines making paintings and sculpture from found and site-specific sources that articulate her relationship with the natural world. She describes her work as ‘souvenirs of explored landscapes’.
Maxim Burnett is a contemporary ‘Symbolist’ whose pictures tell of numinous and mysterious experiences in psychic landscapes populated by mythical and larger than life creatures. These hallucinatory imaginings are painted with an emphasis on saturated colour, dramatic composition and flamboyant gesture.
Olga Calado Moreno is ameticulous and careful crafter of delicate flower studies. Closely observed and artfully rendered, they convey a subtle concentration of focus and a contemplative articulation of the natural world.
Julie Collins paints with acrylic and watercolour. Her particularly subtle lightness of touch creates small-scale, atmospheric and intimate studies of landscape. Spare and emblematic figures and trees serve as figurative markers in the coolly-rendered space.
Adam Dant is a widely-acclaimed artist best known as a print maker who specialises in topographic maps of London, particularly notable for their detail of execution and erudite annotation. This exhibition, however, features one of his recent canvas pieces, which demonstrates the ancient craft of the ‘Stainer’.
Eloise Dethier Eaton’s watercolour images of clothing, delicately described on transparent paper, speak of a certain vulnerability. Evocative of the body, but also of absence, they anticipate and suggest the story and history of both the maker and wearer of the garment.
Sara Edison is a portrait and figure painter who investigates character through her disciplined interrogation of representational technique. A fluent handler of the brush and subtle colourist, she is represented here by images of engaging psychological enquiry.
Rose Fulbright investigates ideals ofbeauty, glamour and the ’Civilised body’ through a vigorous and gestural handling of richly-variegated colour. Her excavation of the female form throws out fragments of broken imagery that weave themselves through skeins and films of glimmering paint.
Jane Masojada is a contemporary figurative artist specialising in portraiture. Influenced by her South African upbringing and scientific background in botany and zoology, her work blends vivid colour, light and anatomical precision.
Sally Minns showsabstract pieces that conjure amalgamations of cavernous, rounded forms reminiscent of the internal spaces of the body. She employs an almost entirely homochromatic palette of sonorous and earthy reds.
Susan Rich is a portrait artist working mostly in watercolour. She deploys a lively, economical and graphic method that emphasises a spontaneous, ‘snapshot’ capture of scene and human interaction.
Harry Rudham’s allegorical picturesplay with the viewers’ expectations. Some of his enigmatic images are, on closer inspection, made up of small discreet elements that modify our experience. Mystery and metaphorical surprises make for puzzle-like compositions that invite speculative interpretation.
Elena Unger paints Gothicfantasy landscapes that are sites of both spiritual revelation and sublime terror. Her whirling vortices of tempestuous paint disclose a myriad of tiny angels caught in the maelstrom, which they may, however, be responsible for.
Tim Wright explores a twilight and turbulent world of romantic dream and reverie. Executed in glazes, washes and scumbles of oil paint, his lyrical compositions of oakleaves and foliage – vegetal symbols of classical and folkloric significance - speak of a mystical yearning for sacred spaces.
This exhibition features artists who have been admitted to the Company recently. It reflects a determined drive to recruit professional practitioners from a wide variety of backgrounds and disciplines from the contemporary art world. This is a sample of the deep well of talent on which the Company can draw.
Pontone Gallery and the Painter-Stainers’ Company both value the hard-won crafts of painting and sculpture. We see the acquisition and deployment of a profound understanding of technique as an exciting and visually sophisticated pathway to gripping outcomes. This cohort of artists, as various and conceptually divergent as they are, all hold this ideal in common, one shared by Pontone and its stable of artists.
Yuki Aruga paints floral motifs that unfurl themselves in a virtuoso display of acute observational skill. Her forensic depictions of natural forms are suffused with an expressive intensity that transcends the everyday.
Simon Bejer works up lyrical and wry scenarios that combine various kinds of disparate imagery. His slickly rendered pictures employ both Rococo and comic-book techniques to depict a world of ‘magical realism’.
Polly Bennett works across disciplines making paintings and sculpture from found and site-specific sources that articulate her relationship with the natural world. She describes her work as ‘souvenirs of explored landscapes’.
Maxim Burnett is a contemporary ‘Symbolist’ whose pictures tell of numinous and mysterious experiences in psychic landscapes populated by mythical and larger than life creatures. These hallucinatory imaginings are painted with an emphasis on saturated colour, dramatic composition and flamboyant gesture.
Olga Calado Moreno is ameticulous and careful crafter of delicate flower studies. Closely observed and artfully rendered, they convey a subtle concentration of focus and a contemplative articulation of the natural world.
Julie Collins paints with acrylic and watercolour. Her particularly subtle lightness of touch creates small-scale, atmospheric and intimate studies of landscape. Spare and emblematic figures and trees serve as figurative markers in the coolly-rendered space.
Adam Dant is a widely-acclaimed artist best known as a print maker who specialises in topographic maps of London, particularly notable for their detail of execution and erudite annotation. This exhibition, however, features one of his recent canvas pieces, which demonstrates the ancient craft of the ‘Stainer’.
Eloise Dethier Eaton’s watercolour images of clothing, delicately described on transparent paper, speak of a certain vulnerability. Evocative of the body, but also of absence, they anticipate and suggest the story and history of both the maker and wearer of the garment.
Sara Edison is a portrait and figure painter who investigates character through her disciplined interrogation of representational technique. A fluent handler of the brush and subtle colourist, she is represented here by images of engaging psychological enquiry.
Rose Fulbright investigates ideals ofbeauty, glamour and the ’Civilised body’ through a vigorous and gestural handling of richly-variegated colour. Her excavation of the female form throws out fragments of broken imagery that weave themselves through skeins and films of glimmering paint.
Jane Masojada is a contemporary figurative artist specialising in portraiture. Influenced by her South African upbringing and scientific background in botany and zoology, her work blends vivid colour, light and anatomical precision.
Sally Minns showsabstract pieces that conjure amalgamations of cavernous, rounded forms reminiscent of the internal spaces of the body. She employs an almost entirely homochromatic palette of sonorous and earthy reds.
Susan Rich is a portrait artist working mostly in watercolour. She deploys a lively, economical and graphic method that emphasises a spontaneous, ‘snapshot’ capture of scene and human interaction.
Harry Rudham’s allegorical picturesplay with the viewers’ expectations. Some of his enigmatic images are, on closer inspection, made up of small discreet elements that modify our experience. Mystery and metaphorical surprises make for puzzle-like compositions that invite speculative interpretation.
Elena Unger paints Gothicfantasy landscapes that are sites of both spiritual revelation and sublime terror. Her whirling vortices of tempestuous paint disclose a myriad of tiny angels caught in the maelstrom, which they may, however, be responsible for.
Tim Wright explores a twilight and turbulent world of romantic dream and reverie. Executed in glazes, washes and scumbles of oil paint, his lyrical compositions of oakleaves and foliage – vegetal symbols of classical and folkloric significance - speak of a mystical yearning for sacred spaces.
