Structure Colour & Light - a-n The Artists Information Company

Venue: Barbican Library Gallery, Barbican Centre
Starts: Tuesday, September 3, 2013
Ends: Wednesday, September 25, 2013
Address: Silk Street, London EC2Y 8DS
Location: London

The Barbican Library, Barbican Centre has selected London based artist Ann Kopka for a solo exhibition. “Structure Colour & Light” opens on Tuesday 3 September until Wednesday 25 September with more than twenty vibrant acrylic paintings saturated in colour and singing with energy lighting up the Barbican Library exhibition space. Ann Kopka’s current painting practice is inspired by her encounters with the architecture of manmade and natural urban landscapes as she walks the city streets absorbing the geography of her surroundings. Her ability to observe and record no doubt instilled during training for an initial career teaching geography. Ann Kopka’s painting process is based on curiosity, research and experimentation with digitally manipulated images. Her paintings are underpinned by a strong visual emphasis on experimentation with structure, colour and light and are built up in multiple layers of saturated colour, resulting in vibrant surfaces with distinctive three dimensional qualities. Ann Kopka studied Fine Art at Central St Martin’s College of Art and Design and the City Lit Institute London. She studied The Practices and Debates of Modern Art at The Open University and graduated with a First Class Honours degree. She has exhibited her work in London, the UK and also in the USA. Ann Kopka’s next solo exhibition is at the new Brent Civic Centre, Wembley London.

Ann Kopka

Ann Kopka is a visual artist and curator. She has exhibited her work in art galleries, museums, hospitals, churches, libraries and non-conventional spaces in London, the UK, Denmark, Germany, Italy and the USA. Ann’s work is held in private collections in the UK, France, Spain, USA and Australia. Ann’s work has been used to inspire students of all ages, from primary school children to art college students and has been the subject of GCSE art projects. She has also participated in collaborative exhibitions with jazz musicians, poets, writers, architects and designers. Ann’s art practice encompasses painting, 2D and 3D mixed media, digital art and installation. Her current interests are informed by her fascination with the relationships between geometry, design and architecture in both the urban landscape and natural world. With a visual emphasis on exploring the relationships between structure and scale, repetition and pattern, colour and rhythm, her artworks hover between the representation of recognisable images and the non-traditional formal repetition of shapes and structures prevalent in abstract art. Ann’s paintings ‘grow’ through the subtle application of multiple layers of vivid acrylic colour. Colour is employed not to be representational but to convey light and energy, emphasise the circulation of movement and bind the network of structures together into a coherent picture. The slow buildup of vibrant saturated surfaces results in paintings that have an illusion of depth sometimes with distinctive three dimensional qualities contradicting the defining flatness of abstract art and yet in art historical terms allude to analytical cubism, constructivism, op-art and geometric abstraction. The processes of deconstructing and reconstructing subject matter to articulate concepts of space also resonates with Ann’s digital artwork where subject matter is taken out of its original context and re-imagined alluding to a further interpretation of abstraction. Ann’s mixed media and 3D artwork engages with the research, process and transformation of discarded everyday ephemera and disregarded disposable objects of little or no intrinsic value. Through the concept of recycling and ‘making something out of nothing’ Ann seeks to draw attention to the throwaway nature of consumer society and sustainability, questioning our perception of its value systems. Ann studied Fine Art at Central St Martins College of Art and Design and The City Lit London. She graduated from the Open University with a First Class Honours Degree where she studied The Practices and Debates of Modern Art. She has studied Museum Curating at The Tate Modern and contemporary curating at The City Lit. Ann has organised and curated several temporary exhibitions at the Heath Robinson Museum London. Ann is a member of The Free Painters and Sculptors, an independent artists co-operative and charity and also The New Constructivists artists organisation. Ann is a former member of Harrow Open Studios and the dissolved Brent Artists Resource.