Eagle Artists: Part One
10 October - 7 November 2008

Peter Abrahams, Basil Beattie, Jane Bustin,
Zara Matthews, Terry Smith

The first in a series of survey exhibitions featuring the Eagle Gallery’s represented artists.
In a range of works that include abstract, minimal and figurative paintings the exhibition explores themes of architectural and metaphorical space.

Peter Abrahams’s large-scale inkjet prints are still life images culled from the detritus of the kitchen cabinet and car boot sales. His deeply evocative photographs are poised on a threshold that makes their medium difficult to discern. Arranged and lit to reference classical traditions in painting, these images make simple objects visually sumptuous. Abrahams will be having a solo exhibition at the Eagle Gallery in 2009.

Basil Beattie’s small canvases exhibit his signature use of pictographic signs – tracks and tunnels that recede into the picture plane, or are incised into the surface of thickly applied oil and wax.
Beattie is having a solo show of recent paintings at the Two Rooms Gallery, New Zealand from 23 October – 22 November and will be showing recent work in London in September 2009 at a joint exhibition between the Eagle Gallery and the Purdy Hicks Gallery.

Jane Bustin’s mixed media painting was made after the artist came across a neglected building which bore the inscription ‘Letters Hotel’. Currently involved in a collaboration with the writers Tracey Chevalier and John Hull, the poetic appeal of a building that might temporarily house lost or strayed texts encouraged her to make a work that references the architectural details of the building in her use of materials and supports. Bustin will be showing paintings from her project ‘Unseen – a Collaboration’ at the British Library from January – March 2009.

Zara Matthews’s sequence of Stanizina paintings were initiated from photographs she made
in Italy of a bedroom in a small pension. Unaware that her camera was broken the resulting images were curiously bleached and ghost like, as if she had caught a presence of the room quite apart from its physical appearance. These have given rise to a group of works, at different scales and with different applications of paint that are a form of a portrait of this peaceful interior. Matthews will be having her fifth solo exhibition with the Eagle Gallery in 2009.

Terry Smith has made many large-scale temporary installations in the past twenty years that have used the fabric of buildings as a canvas to incise into, reform, or deconstruct. In sites as various as the British Museum, Tate Bankside and a derelict house in South London his work has revealed formal and psychological propositions about architecture and dwelling places. Smith’s drawings are reflections on, rather than records of, these projects and carry his working methods onto paper. Architectural details are scratched into the surface of photographic paper and scattered with graphite to produce images and great elegance and restraint.

Forthcoming:

James Fisher:
I came here a stranger
13 November - 13 December
Second sold show with former RCA graduate. The recent paintings explore the writings of John Clare and the libretto of Schubert’s Winterreise.
Shown in conjunction with: As a stranger I depart at the Campden Gallery, Chipping Campden
22 November – 14 December

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)