JAMES FISHER

I came here a stranger 13 November – 14 December 2008
@ Eagle Gallery, London

as a stranger I depart 22 November - 14 December 2008
@ Campden Gallery, Chipping Campden

James Fisher is showing a new body of work in two related exhibitions:
I came here a stranger opens at the Eagle Gallery, London on 13 November
and as a stranger I depart continues two weeks later at the Campden
Gallery, Chipping Campden, with a jointly published catalogue linking the two shows.

Fisher’s recent paintings were made in response to two different texts:
Wilhelm Müller’s libretto for Schubert’s Winterreise song cycle, and an account written by the English poet John Clare describing his escape from an asylum in Epping Forest and his long walk home
to the fenland of Cambridgeshire. Each text is a description of a journey, undertaken as a result of lost or unrequited love.
Fisher uses the framework of the texts in an oblique way to provide the subjects for his paintings, but also makes reference to the form and texture of the two sources in the process of the works.
Just as the experience of Winterreise is a synthesis of words interpreted through music and Clare’s account a blend of observed fact, misremembering and hallucination, Fisher’s images are more complex and go much further than illustrative depictions. The canvases are deeply worked, with hard chalk grounds layered with bronze dust mixed in wax and glaze upon oil based glaze. The paintings are moved on and off the stretcher, sanded and reduced almost to the weave, so that the images become ghosts of originals long removed from their starting points.
Martin Holman writes in the catalogue: “More than illustration can achieve, these images proceed by painting the spaces perceived between
words.”
The trauma of estrangement is shown in the silhouettes of two figures buffeted by a pink tinged, snow filled wind; their remembered connection in the tendrils of plants and flowers creeping across the surface of a canvas. Clare’s yearning for his lost, long dead love has been transposed into images of a female figure holding an animal, protectively, to her breast. Elsewhere the paintings erode completely into a tangled, almost abstract mesh of forest trees.

A fully illustrated catalogue with texts by Martin Holman and James Fisher is available
ISBN 978-0-9554046-6-5
For further details or images please contact
Eagle Gallery on 020 7833 2674
info@emmahilleagle.com

please also see www.campdengallery.co.uk

Eagle Artists Exhibitions UK & International

Paul Coldwell: I called while you were out - solo exhibition
27 September - 11 January 2009 at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge (www.kettlesyard.co.uk)

Jane Bustin: Figuring Light: Colour and the Intangible - group exhibition
14 November - 18 January 2009 at Djanogly Gallery, University of Nottingham
(www.lakesidearts.co.uk)

Jane Bustin: Paintings 1998 – 2008 - solo exhibition
19 November - 20 December 2008 at Artprojx Space, London (www.artprojxspace.com)

Unseen - A Collaboration with Tracy Chevalier & John Hull
12 January - 14 March 2009 at The British Library, London (www.bl.uk)

Basil Beattie: The Janus Series, Part 1 - solo exhibition
23 October – 22 November 2008 at Two Rooms, New Zealand (www.tworooms.org.nz)