Comme Ca Art presents

‘Contemporary Painting’

Featuring:

Claire, Carpenter, Rael Gough, David Hancock, Andrew George Magee, Amy Russell, Joe Simpson, Simon Taylor & Hannah Wooll

27th November 2008 – 20th January 2009

The Lowry Hotel
50 Dearmans Place, Chapel Wharf Salford, M3 5LH

Preview evening: Thursday 27th November 6pm – 8pm

Comme Ca Art’s final exhibition of 2008 previews some of 2009’s most promising painters. The line-up brings together a number of artists whose subjects are as diverse as you will find in the painted world, including examples of abstraction, realism and classicism.

“Painting has always been one of my favourite mediums of art and I am proud to present both new and established artists in our final show of 2008.”
Claire Turner, Director of Comme Ca Art

The Artists:

Claire Carpenters recent paintings are semi autobiographical in their content. This work depicts a contemporary aspect of birth, taken from the life & death cycle in Greek Mythology where the Goddess Persephone represents fertility in the world, spending time in the underworld, when the world goes through winter, and returning in spring to bring life to the earth. The original photographic image this painting was inspired by was taken when she was nine months pregnant.

Her painting technique is highly textural and with brush strokes and pallete knife lines visible within the layers of paint. Claire has been exhibiting nationally and internationally for ten years, and in the past has received funding to live and work in New York. Currently she is working with a Gallery to produce her first book, which will contain fifty selected paintings from her past body of work.

Rael Gough is a young artist with a studio space in Bolton who dedicates his time to developing and nurturing his individual style. His works are varied and experimental, very detailed and intensely personal expressionist paintings that mix both abstract and figurative styles. Inspired by the memories of family and friends, his works evoke stories and emotions that determine the people we become.

In 2001 David Hancock was the first artist to have a solo exhibition at Comme Ca’s new Chorlton Mill Gallery in Manchester and won City Life’s ‘Visual Arts Exhibition of the Year’. His many commendations include the BP Portrait Prize, the John Moore’s 21 Contemporary Painting exhibition and being short-listed for the BOC Emerging Artist Award. David has had solo exhibitions at View 2 Gallery, Liverpool and Dean Clough Galleries, Halifax as well as being profiled by Art Review.

David’s work is rooted in the tradition of Romanticism or the Victorian utopian visions of Ruskin, Morris and Pre-Raphaelitism. The signifiers are taken from historical works of art, sources and themes. These are suggested through the appropriation of composition, gestures or objects. In the use of paint, combined with a traditional method of realisation, as well as the choice for a large scale, these works claim a historical significance, elevating the status of the paintings, and subsequently transporting these works to an era when myth, symbolism and truth to nature were prevalent in art.

'How many people have wished that they could peel off their human skin, their self-awareness, and find only fur and instinct and a fresh start underneath?'
A L Kennedy from her essay 'In Search of Contentment'

In Andrew George Magee’s recent body of work, his paintings are populated with goat-headed girls clothed in couture dresses. These women are not for pitying. The paintings suggest a world where mutation has been heightened to a pinnacle of reverie.

Religiosity and images of feminine power are ever present throughout Magee's work. Whereas the geisha represented the rise to a state of realised grace, the goat-girl personifies the fall into decadence and pleasure; into a hedonistic playground, a masked ball of mysticism and idolatry.

Andrew employs the repeated motif of the Datura flower, [a tropane plant traditionally used in hermetic rituals] which is associated with divination and feminine power in a number of cultures and with deities such as the goddess Kali in Hinduism. Feeding from a variety of source material from fashion editorials to early alchemical engravings the artist works in a universe where Cabbala meets Cavalli and the contemporary and the archaic are equally present.

Amy Russell’s narrative, autobiographical works combine paint and mixed media with collages of mundane print materials preserved from her day-to-day life to create striking, evocative and personal imagery. The use of text and typography, cut from newspapers or printed with wooden type blocks, adds a strong graphical element to her compositions, and utilizes the media typeface as comment on the ever-fluctuating notions of beauty and glamour in the visual world.

Joe Simpson's practice deals with the narrative potential of the still image. Working in oil paint, he creates photo-realistic images that utilise the conventions of cinematography to present ‘staged’, fictitious scenes where time has been stopped and extended. These frozen moments are deliberately ambiguous, inviting the viewer to inject their own emotions, motivations and narrative context into the scene, thereby not limiting interpretation.

Simon Taylor’s work is based around ideas of perception; questioning the validity and source of received visual information. His painting process is complex. Working from photographs taken from life and film stills, he digitally manipulates the image and reproduces them using acrylic on canvas.

Winning the Sefton Open Art Prize in 2006, Simon’s work has been purchased by many private collectors, public collectors and galleries.  Original paintings and images have been used for television productions and a variety of publications worldwide.

Hannah Wooll’s works pay homage to the depiction of the female within art history. Old Hollywood, tethered with the frivolity of more contemporary media imagery create narratives within Wooll’s aesthetic that explore the dynamic between her painted seductresses and the viewer caught between these vying eyes. In her paintings expect to see an homage to Gainsborough’s girls, German old master blondes and religious icons. Enlarged eyes, wide faces and gangly limbs subvert the surface prettiness of her females; their beautifully tousled locks becoming a heavy, tangled, and unruly painted burden.

"The work in RAdical demonstrates how students were encouraged to use their technical skills with the paintbrush not only to paint pictures, but also to convey their own ideas and insights…. During Hannah Wooll's last year there, she hit upon an idea that would lead to her own distinctive imagery.
"Extractfrom "Academic Brilliance" by Colin Gleadell, Telegraph Magazine, 5 February 2005

If you would like to attend the preview or would like further information about any of the artists listed please contact: claire.turner@commecaart.com.

(Top image 'Amy Russell, The Lowry Hotel')

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