PETER ABRAHAMS DOUBLE – SPACE
8 April – 15 May 2009

Peter Abrahams’ first solo exhibition with the Eagle Gallery introduces a new body of photographic works which fall into two categories.
A sequence of diptychs entitled The Active and Contemplative Life combine ‘found’ images taken from the urban environment – the upper panel showing the trace of human presence and the lower, a more abstracted architectural detail (which call into mind Abrahams’ earlier elegant and minimal paintings on canvas).
In counterpoint to these are two series of large-scale still lifes:
Illuminations and Vanitas - photographs that mobilize a profoundly painterly mise-en-scène.

Abrahams studied painting at Camberwell School of Art and the Royal Academy Schools and in 1982 was awarded a residency as the Museo del Prado, where he researched the many fine examples of the Haarlem school and in particular the work of Pieter Claesz, a master of the moral arrangement of the embarrassment of riches.
Abrahams’ still life images play with the drama of light and shadow found in these classical works, but present for contemplation categories of objects that earlier practices disenfranchised. The Illuminations images dwell on the paraphernalia of light in the form of lamps, torches, cabling and a collapsed television; the Vanitas photographs show the detritus of cleaning products or carefully posed juxtapositions of two simple objects: a bowl of milk and a pot of ink, a steel bucket and a grater.

Christopher Pinney (Professor of Anthropology and Visual Culture at University College, London) writes in his catalogue text for Double – Space: ‘The singular and doubled frames, which at first glance seem to separate Peter Abrahams’ still lifes and diptychs into two distinct series, are part of a gloria mundi that soon passes. Meditation upon these contemplative and profoundly serious images reveal the shadowy double which infects the single images, paradigmatically, or through a principle of substitution or replacement. Abrahams’ single images conjure a mediatory shadow every bit as powerful as the manifest subaltern shadows of the diptychs.”

Catalogue available with text by Christopher Pinney

Other Gallery news:
James Fisher has a solo exhibition ‘My Hopes are Not Entirely Hopeless’ at the Pond Gallery, Aldeburgh Music, Snape 13 – 28 June.

Tom Hammick has been commissioned by Glyndebourne to make an edition of six handprinted limited edition posters for the 2009 opera season.

Zara Matthews has been selected as one of 13 artists to be shown in the Whitechapel Gallery’s East End Academy – The Painting Exhibition (9 July – 20 September)

For further details of both exhibitions please contact The Eagle Galleryon 020 7833 2674 or email: emmahilleagle@aol.com