JAMES FISHER, AMANDA THESIGER, REBECCA SITAR, ORSINA SFORZA
Conscious Fiction
9 December - 28 January 2005

Conscious Fiction takes its title from a text by the painter Merlin James in which he curated a hypothetical show to test the possibilities and limitations of painting within current visual practice.

The Eagle Gallery’s exhibition presents four artists whose work share affinities in the deployment of an individual painterly vocabulary to make images which contain resonant, sometimes unsettling, ambiguities.
Limitation is acknowledged in each of the artist’s work, whether it be in the non-narrative abstraction of Amanda Thesiger’s amorphic forms, or Orsina Sforza’s unidentifiable 'presences’ - that are simply the result of pulsating, fluid sweeps of oil paint on paper. In the works of James Fisher and Rebecca Sitar, which tend towards incorporating elements that can be read more figuratively, any single reading of the image is disrupted by the artists’ play with two dimensional pictorial space and many-layered surfaces of pattern and veils of paint.

James Fisher is a young painter who trained at the Royal College of Art and has forthcoming solo shows at the Eagle Gallery and the Rochester Art Gallery in Spring 2005. Amanda Thesiger has shown regularly since the early 1990s including ACE at the Hayward Gallery in 1996, the John Moores 20 Open, Liverpool
(1997) and Slow Burn at the Mead Gallery in 1998. Rebecca Sitar had her second solo show with the Eagle in April 2004 and has had solo shows including the Turnpike Gallery, Leigh and the Castlefield Gallery, Manchester. Orsina Sforza lives and works in Rome and shows regularly in Europe. She had a solo show with the Eagle in 2000.