- Venue
- Phoenix Gallery
- Starts
- Friday, May 14, 2010
- Ends
- Sunday, July 4, 2010
- Address
- Bradnich Place Gandy Street Exeter EX4 3LS United Kingdom
- Location
- South West England
This exhibition brings together two artists who probe the fragile and shifting processes of ‘becoming’ in art as in nature. Their work seeks to embody the uncertainty and flux of all forms, living and inert. Their shared interest in the ambiguity of form is revealed in ways that are open ended, suggestive rather than instructive. They draw out the often imperceptible particularities of our evolving selves, as well as the mental and physical spaces we inhabit. Anne Gathmann’s understated interventions in public spaces bring to the fore subtle architectural details, fore-grounding the peculiarity of our subjective outlooks. Her delicate works on paper are saturated with wet paint till they wrinkle and resist their original two dimensional flatness. Overlapping, inserting and taping these sheets together her simple, abstract watercoloured motifs multiply and jostle to create partially obscured almost sculptural wall hangings. Fiona MacDonald’s interconnected semi-figurative paintings and sculptures rarely directly represent nature, but are inspired by its diversity and uncanny coincidences. Her highly tactile paintings are built up through contrasting watercolour with linear configurations and sweeps of thick oil paint evoking an array of natural forms bursting forth. Her sculptural pieces made from unfired clay covered with a cloying skin of pigmented silicone are similarly enigmatic despite their echoing familiar tableaux by artists like Goya and Titian.
