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Harriet Mena Hill, James Fisher, Donna Maclean,
Sean Molloy, William Wright
24 October – 22 November 2019
Painting Painting brings together five artists who incorporate references to historic paintings in their work in order to make new and contemporary images. Each has an individual approach as to how and why they employ this kind of source material – with allusions ranging from Renaissance and Baroque, to Modern British art.
Harriet Mena Hill’s series of miniature oil on gesso panels make reference to details in
The Resurrection of Lazarus, attributed to the studio of Simone Martini. Imagined planetary forms are wrapped in bandages that refer to the shroud which encases Christ’s body – extending Hill’s use of conjectured places as ‘image-symbols of emotionality and inner feeling’. (Martin Holman).
Recent paintings by James Fisher take their inspiration from an 1820 watercolour manuscript that depicts the Hindu epic Ramayana. Fisher transcribes details from the miniature at a much larger scale in a medium of oil on linen, distancing the image from its original narrative function and heightening the abstract elements of texture, pattern and colour.
Seeking to emulate the feeling engendered by Caspar David Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea, Donna Maclean travelled to Nevada to find the vast, empty landscape she required as the starting point for a series of paintings of roads at night. The images capture fleeting moments in which the lit-up tarmac and scrub suggest journeys into an unknown future – a metaphorical use of landscape that is powerfully expressed in the Romantic tradition.
Sean Molloy’s key concern as an artist is to investigate the relevance of painting in a digitally-mediated world. Molloy appropriates traditional subject matter from sources within the Baroque painting canon, creating meticulously rendered backdrops of miniature tondo portraits and capriccio-type fantasy landscapes. This idyllic, brooding past is overlaid with flashes of digital disruption – elements of ‘visual static’ associated with G.C.I., games and image manipulation software.
William Wright’s series The Painter’s Table pay tribute to his love of the work of Giorgio Morandi. Using the repeated motif of a simple, flattened-out table upon which rests an open book, Wright gives a powerful insight into the thoughts of the painter. The tiny still-lives follow a strict aesthetic and are painted using a restricted palette. Each contains an acknowledgement to a past artist, referenced as an image in the pages of a monograph.
Painting Painting runs concurrently with James Fisher’s solo exhibition Flotilla – a pleasure trip with Yuru-Kyara, at White Conduit Projects.
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HARRIET MENA HILL Bound Planet IV, 2019, oil
JAMES FISHER Rama and Lakshmana with a Sage, 2019, oil on canvas
WILLIAM WRIGHT Painters Table XV, 2019, acrylic on gesso panel
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