REBECCA SITAR
Present & Elsewhere
11 May - 15 June 2007

Rebecca Sitar's third solo exhibition with the Eagle Gallery features paintings and works on paper from a recent major public exhibition which took place at the Galerija Karas, Zagreb in 2006.

Sitar was honoured to be one of the first Contemporary British artists to be shown in Croatia and the exhibition was supported by the British Council and the Arts Council of England. We are delighted to have the opportunity to show these works, which were made during the last three years.

Present & Elsewhere refers to an implicit duality that exists in Sitar's images.
Present references subtle characteristics that bring the paintings to attention as objects, simultaneously recalling traits of modernism revisited.
This language of formalist abstraction is subverted by elements of figuration.
Particular forms or incidents in the paint are held up for inspection, requiring and eliciting a subjective response. Sitar hints at narratives, conveying through the process of her painting, the pictorial spaces of a fictitious landscape. Elsewhere is a 'no place', a painted illusory space in which emblems hover against backgrounds that are ambiguous and shifting.

In her catalogue text for the exhibition the writer Sue Hubbard observes:

Sitar's forms are implicitly organic and emblematic, as if culled from some deep archetypal image bank, yet it is in the process of exploring these forms through the language of paint that she moves them into an arena that is essentially metaphoric, where meaning resides not in a direct deconstruction or decoding of an image but in the spaces and silences she creates.

Rebecca Sitar has had six previous solo shows including the Turnpike Gallery, Leigh and the Castlefield Gallery, Manchester. She was included in the major touring exhibition Slow Burn - Meaning & Vision in Contemporary British Abstract Painting (originated by the Mead Gallery, Warwick in 1998), Beginnings at the Whitworth Gallery, Manchester
(2000) and Beyond the Endgame at Manchester Art Gallery (2003).
Sitar's work is held in the collections of Deutsche Bank AG, London; DLA Solicitors, London and Manchester Art Gallery.

Catalogue available