Image: Threads II by Jane Bustin 2015
The Shape of Things
Featuring artists:
Katrina Blannin
Jane Bustin
Selma Parlour
Tim Ellis
Curated by India Whalley and Ben Austin
Private View: June 25, 6pm – 9pm
Exhibition: June 26 – July 31, 2015
‘The Shape of Things’ is the second group exhibition at The Dot Project and examines the artistic practice of geometric abstraction in a contemporary context.
The Dot Project
94 Fulham Road
London, SW3 6HS
0207 589 9199
Tabitha by Jane Bustin, 2013
CHAPTER
Now open and it is excellent !!!
An ancient order of friars and a group of young artists will open a new non-profit, contemporary art space in west London with its inaugural show, ‘Chapter’, on Thursday 20 June.
Priest and artist Gianni Notarianni O.S.A. (Order of Saint Augustine), and artists Robert Phillips, Rose Davey, Donal Moloney, Kieren Reed and Sarah Kate Wilson have invited eighteen established and emerging artists to exhibit in the new Austin Forum, Hammersmith. The artists have been chosen to represent excellence in a cross section of contemporary art practices, with established artists exhibiting alongside emerging practitioners and with an emphasis on creative ways of responding to the Austin Forum space.
The exhibiting artists are: Ed Allington, Jo Bruton, Bronwen Buckeridge, Jane Bustin, James Capper, Matthew Ensor, Geraint Evans, Nick Goss, Abigail Hunt, Sachin Kaeley, Sam Kennedy, Natasha Kidd, Hannah Lees, Barry Martin, Bruce McLean, Damien Meade, Tom Price, Jo Volley.
The title ‘Chapter’, a name given to the friars practice of coming together in the priory to share issues and ideas, alludes to the intentional decision to have no overarching theme for the show, rather a sharing and celebration of contrasting expressions.
Opening Times:
Exhibition opening times: 21 June – 4 July 2013
Tuesday -Sunday 11am to 7pm, (Monday by appointment)
The Space: Austin Forum
The Austin Forum’s subterranean, double-height space is located in the Augustinian Centre, behind St. Augustine’s Church and Priory, 55 Fulham Palace Road, W6 8AU. Near Hammersmith for tubes and buses.
BACK AND FORTH
8 artists from London
private view: Thursday 16th February, 19.00
B55 Gallery, 1055 – Hungary, Budapest, Balaton u.4
exhibition on view until 17th of March, 2012
JANE BUSTIN / SIMON CALLERY / ROSE DAVEY / LOTHAR GÖTZ / TAMÁS JOVÁNOVICS / KÁROLY KESERÜ / DILLWYN SMITH / ESTELLE THOMPSON
www.b55galeria.hu / art@b55galeria.hu / +3613541350 /
open: Thu-Fri: 12.00-18.00, Sat 10.00 -13.00, Sun, Mon: closed
Back and Forth – Catalogue essay by Estelle Thompson / Tamás Jovánovics
Back and forth — there is a lot of back and forth in making an exhibition happen. In a group show there are conversations from artist to artist, then from artists to venue and back again. In this instance there is the moving of work and artists from one country to another, and back again. But the ‘real‘ back and forth is in the making of paintings, in the studio, their evolution — the thinking. There is also the relationship of painting to its history and to its future. Traveling back to Malevich’s ‘Black Square’ is much quoted right now yet it might equally mean looking much further back (or sideways even) whilst thinking about how to move on.
Our initial selection of artists for ‘Back and Forth’ relied on what could be called painters’ instinct. Without articulating our criteria, we knew instinctively, as painter/curators that these painters shared a fascination with, and respect for, the formal field (the area defined by the support) of the painting. Regardless of what is painted on it, a painting support is usually a rectangle, square, circle or oval — it is geometric. It is the geometry of this field that each of these artists, no matter what the mode of their articulation, obsessively activate. This ‘thinking’ isn’t as universal amongst painters now as one might imagine and the various forms of dealing with it are pertinent here. Light and colour are also crucial to all of these painters — colour reflecting light or absorbing light — illuminated or mute. And variously all these painters actively configure colour and materiality to evoke space or alternatively to reassert surface in their works.
Estelle Thompson, Jane Bustin and Rose Davey all assume, in their own ways that the painting is dictated by its own archetypical form and proportions. They each adhere to a reductive play whether via a modified use of monochrome or division of the painting field. Thompson’s seemingly simple colour compositions seek to trigger the eye and make the process of looking active. The weight, place, balance and discord of form and colour demand of, rather than placate, the eye. The flat colour is always animated, abraded and reworked so that the surface implies the history of its making. They sit on an edge between harmony and discord.
Davey, in a more architectural way, also paints to the proportions of the ‘field’. Her accentuated use of materials — wooden panels, which often remain visible — contrast the ‘skin’ of the paint employed. Earlier works directly referenced actual architecture, but now the planes of colour, sometimes window like, reference painting language and its architecture. In these paintings colour is employed to ‘hum’ and ‘hover’. They are visually concentrated.
In Bustin’s work, untouched surfaces operate alongside painted elements. The selection and orchestration of this contrasting or harmonising of materials forms the visual
‘hit’ and locks us into the viewing. Whether matte and mute, or super shiny, the way in which these are worked together is key. Bustin adds another dimension through verbal and musical allegations in order to emphasise the metaphysical potential of painting. She seeks to render visual concepts found in language, music, science and theology.
Art historically there also exists a tendency to de-canonise the rectangular field — artists such as Stella, Morellet and Buren de-constructed the rectangularity of painting. Simon Callery and Tamás Jovánovics represent this historical stream of painting in the Expanded Field.
Callery’s aim is to explore painting as both a pictorial and sculptural entity. He literally opens up and folds the surface of the work to form ‘paintings’ (25 continuous meters of canvas are used on a large work). In a parallel set of circular works, which are more like broken spheres that have shifted, it is this ‘slippage’ that deconstructs the painted field. Callery’s works do not transmit a finitude; they offer an emphatically material and temporal character — they are his ‘excavation sites’. Callery’s colour holds the weight of and is symbiotic with his use of form.
Jovánovics also deconstructs as a means to break the painterly field. Jovánovics sections and arranges multiple panels in order to accentuate their illusionistic power. The paintings make a floating visual sign, interacting with both real and virtual space. It is the implied depth of field and at the same time the actual bi-dimensionality of the painting that affects the viewer and locks them in. The eye moves rapidly from surface to space, and back again, caught in an unending visual scan. The result is both meditative and mesmerising. Lothar Götz, Károly Keserü and Dillwyn Smith each employ geometry in more eclectic ways and form the third tendency within this exhibition.
Götz makes paintings and wall paintings. The wall works (often large scale) employ geometric compositions with intense, complex colour distribution. In ‘Back and Forth’ Götz is represented by smaller paintings and drawings that emphasise line and dynamism. It is a nervous energy that propels the eye again, back and forth. In both his paintings and wall installations Götz sees colour as beautiful and a key aspect of life that surrounds us.
Keserü acknowledges revisiting and rethinking various twentieth century modernist ideas in his work. He is also interested in exploring the relationship of abstraction to archetypal decoration. Like Jovánovics he uses repetition but the ‘multiples’ in his works are found in his recurring lines, dots and grids. The order and disorder occurs as similar marks falter and change. Keserü’s making is meticulous (possibly laborious, though this implies without consideration) and every act is considered. Keserü’s dots and grids are for him a quasi-scientific exploration of optics and subatomic structures in painting.
While Keserü might be dealing with visual phenomena ‘on the border of visibility’, Smith seems to push the limits of the visual towards the meta-visual, employing homeopathic-alike transparent essences as pigments in his work. Smith’s canvases consist of fabric strips stitched together with a quasi geometry, loose and lyrical. The use of a ‘screeching’ colour key in one work contrasts the ‘bleached’ nuanced shift of greys and whites in another. Fabric as materiality is key. Sometimes Smith works with transparent fabric (like Bustin) to ‘dematerialise’ and evoke a space behind the picture plane. These are paintings without visible paint, fully employing the language of painting.
Our spoken or written language keeps evolving, adapted in time and use, making us evaluate its form, quantify its meaning and reinvent it. Surely the same applies to our use and evolution of visual language, painting language
— back and forth.
Estelle Thompson / Tamás Jovánovics
The London Original Print Fair Evite
The Eagle Gallery will be exhibiting at the 26th London Original Print Fair at the Royal Academy, from 19 – 21 April
Jane Bustin will be exhibiting monoprints and letterpress texts from a project entitled Atemwende : Breathturn (after Paul Celan) made in collaboration with Graham Bignell, New North Press, London.
The Eagle Gallery is mounting a special display of artist’s book and printed objects and will be launching new print publications by artists including Jane Bustin, Tom Hammick and Will Maw.
Harriet Mena Hill and Mandy Bonnell will be running childrens workshops during the Fair and Tom Hammick will be giving a demonstration of reduction woodblock printing on Tuesday 19 April.
Eagle Gallery Stand no. 42
Royal Academy of Arts
Burlington House
Piccadilly
London W1
DIVERGENCE
featuring; Alice Browne, Jane Bustin, Dragica Carlin, Sarah McNulty, Nadia Mulder, Susan Sluglett, Claire Undy, Clare Wilson
in an exhibition of abstract painting at Forman’s Smokehouse Gallery, Stour Road, Fish Island, London E3 2NT
PRIVATE VIEW: Thursday 2 September 6-9pm
Clare Wilson - Slow Float
Idea of Islands by Sue Hubbard
Sue Hubbard: THE IDEA OF ISLANDS
Book launch and poetry reading
on Weds 30 June from 7-9pm
at The Eagle Gallery (above The Eagle pub)
at
CALLIGRAMS 24 June – 24 July 2010
Jane Bustin, Kevin Finklea, Matt Magee, Estelle Thompson
The Eagle Gallery
159 Farringdon Road
London EC1R 3AL
open Weds-Fri 11am-6pm and Sat 11am -4pm
0207 833 2674
Idea of Islands
Set in a wild, remote landscape, on the west coast of Ireland, Cill Rialaig is a pre-ramine village that clings to at steep slope 300 feet above the sea on the old road that leads to Bólus Head. The restored stone cottages of the village, which now support residencies for visiting artists, are about as far west as you can go in Europe without falling off. From this rugged coast the island rock of Skellig Michael is visible, some eight miles out into the Atlantic, where pre-Augustinian monks once built their beehive huts. This is a landscape permeated with history and memories. It was here that the poet Sue Hubbard and the painter Donald Teskey met and initiated a collaboration that resulted in this book.
The Idea of Islands comprises a suite of fifteen emotionally incisive poems by Sue Hubbard and eleven powerfully atmospheric drawings by Donald Teskey RHA.
Responding to her experiences of Cill Rialaig, Sue Hubbard explores in her work both the dark and the light within human experience. She evokes the perceived and the actual world through a careful attention to the detail of things – be it nature, the incidental or the everyday – and attempts to give voice to our deepest emotions and our sense of inchoate spiritual longing. Her subjects are those of love, loss and memory. She writes of our vulnerabilities, so often concealed, and through their disclosure suggests the possibility of renewal. Donald Teskey’s large-scale drawings of the Cill Rialaig terrain are no landscape idylls. This body ot work, complementary to the poems, powerfully evokes a vivid sense of that remote and harshly beautiful place, confronting us with the raw forces of nature at the inhospitable edge of the world: the bruised and weathered architecture of the coastline; the ocean, foaming and restless; the cliffs, dark, ancient and enduring; depictions of a dynamic landscape at its most elemental.
http://www.suehubbard.com/the-idea-of-islands.html
http://www.occasionalpress.net/ideaislands/publicationsiofi.htm
Jane Bustin's les dernieres fleurs in Calligrams
les dernieres fleurs by Jane Bustin
CALLIGRAMS 24 June – 24 July 2010
Jane Bustin, Kevin Finklea, Matt Magee, Estelle Thompson
The Eagle Gallery
159 Farringdon Road
London EC1R 3AL
open Weds-Fri 11am-6pm and Sat 11am -4pm
0207 833 2674
CALLIGRAMS 24 June – 24 July 2010
Jane Bustin, Kevin Finklea, Matt Magee, Estelle Thompson
Calligrams features four artists whose work explores contemporary paths of minimalist abstraction. The exhibition brings together UK-based painters Jane Bustin and Estelle Thompson with American artists Matt Magee and Kevin Finklea.
Calligrams poses questions about the challenge involved in reinventing non-representational genres. The artists work within traditional parameters of colour, form and support, yet each in individual ways extends them.
Echoes of Suprematism and Colour Field abstraction are evident in the work of Kevin Finklea and Estelle Thompson, in the use of geometric forms and the manipulation of ranges of complex, high-keyed colours.
Finklea’s recent paintings arise from memories of place and time and have moved off the two-dimensional picture plane into three-dimensional reliefs. The range and vocabulary of Finklea’s colour, whether the exclamatory blush of two contrasting pinks or the meditative quality of a light blue are focused and projected into space through these sculptural forms
.
The intense colours and re-worked surfaces of Estelle Thompson’s oils on panel bring to mind a range of associations from past traditions in painting, from the shimmering light of Renaissance frescos to the distressed surface of Jasper Johns ‘Flag’. Thompson’s nuanced surfaces act in counterpoint to her plays with geometric form, in which a simple division of a rectangle can offer myriad visual possibilities.
Matt Magee’s more emblematic paintings employ simple pictograms such as punctuation marks or numbers, as a way of incorporating language into the work under his own abstract terms. Formally satisfying simply as shapes, these signs are also weighted with exclamatory meaning and are held within surfaces of painterly marks.
Jane Bustin’s investigations into the potential for the abstract image to allude to emotional states or metaphorical ideas are closest perhaps to traditions of the sublime in abstraction. Exploring sources in literature, her recent series of works are made in response to Mallarmé’s volume of poems ‘’Pour Anatole un tombeau’. Employing a range of materials and supports the work has moved into the territory of installation where related paintings and text are sited in three-dimensional arrangements.
Jane Bustin is represented by the Eagle Gallery. Her most recent solo exhibition Unseen – A collaboration, took place at the British Library, London.
Kevin Finklea’s recent solo exhibition Memories are Uncertain Friends was held at Margaret Thatcher Projects, New York.
Matt Magee’s forthcoming solo show takes place at the Knoedler Gallery, New York.
Estelle Thompson is represented by the Purdy Hicks Gallery, where she had a solo show In 2009.
detail of les dernieres fleurs by Jane Bustin
Contact: Jane Bustin
janebustin@hotmail.com
https://davidgryn.wordpress.com/
detail of les dernieres fleurs by Jane Bustin
Beloved by Jane Bustin
Jane Bustin features in the forthcoming show
CALLIGRAMS
Join us for drinks at the Private View 6.30pm-8.30pm on June 23rd
Exhibition runs 24 June – 24 July
The Eagle Gallery
159 Farringdon Road
London EC1R 3AL
open Weds-Fri 11am-6pm and Sat 11am -4pm
0207 833 2674
les derniers fleurs by Jane Bustin
CALLIGRAMS 24 June – 24 July 2010
Jane Bustin, Kevin Finklea, Matt Magee, Estelle Thompson
Calligrams features four artists whose work explores contemporary paths of minimalist abstraction. The exhibition brings together UK-based painters Jane Bustin and Estelle Thompson with American artists Matt Magee and Kevin Finklea.
Calligrams poses questions about the challenge involved in reinventing non-representational genres. The artists work within traditional parameters of colour, form and support, yet each in individual ways extends them.
Echoes of Suprematism and Colour Field abstraction are evident in the work of Kevin Finklea and Estelle Thompson, in the use of geometric forms and the manipulation of ranges of complex, high-keyed colours.
Finklea’s recent paintings arise from memories of place and time and have moved off the two-dimensional picture plane into three-dimensional reliefs. The range and vocabulary of Finklea’s colour, whether the exclamatory blush of two contrasting pinks or the meditative quality of a light blue are focused and projected into space through these sculptural forms
.
The intense colours and re-worked surfaces of Estelle Thompson’s oils on panel bring to mind a range of associations from past traditions in painting, from the shimmering light of Renaissance frescos to the distressed surface of Jasper Johns ‘Flag’. Thompson’s nuanced surfaces act in counterpoint to her plays with geometric form, in which a simple division of a rectangle can offer myriad visual possibilities.
Matt Magee’s more emblematic paintings employ simple pictograms such as punctuation marks or numbers, as a way of incorporating language into the work under his own abstract terms. Formally satisfying simply as shapes, these signs are also weighted with exclamatory meaning and are held within surfaces of painterly marks.
Jane Bustin’s investigations into the potential for the abstract image to allude to emotional states or metaphorical ideas are closest perhaps to traditions of the sublime in abstraction. Exploring sources in literature, her recent series of works are made in response to Mallarmé’s volume of poems ‘’Pour Anatole un tombeau’. Employing a range of materials and supports the work has moved into the territory of installation where related paintings and text are sited in three-dimensional arrangements.
Jane Bustin is represented by the Eagle Gallery. Her most recent solo exhibition Unseen – A collaboration, took place at the British Library, London.
Kevin Finklea’s recent solo exhibition Memories are Uncertain Friends was held at Margaret Thatcher Projects, New York.
Matt Magee’s forthcoming solo show takes place at the Knoedler Gallery, New York.
Estelle Thompson is represented by the Purdy Hicks Gallery, where she had a solo show In 2009.
Four Rectangles (for KM) by Estelle Thompson
Geary Street by Kevin Finklea
Division by Matt Magee
Jane features in the forthcoming show
Calligrams.
Join us for drinks at the Private View starting at 6.30pm on June 23rd
24 June – 24 July
The Eagle Gallery
159 Farringdon Road
London EC1R 3AL
open Weds-Fri 11am-6pm and Sat 11am -4pm
0207 833 2674
Jane Bustin les dernieres fleurs 2010
Kevin Finklea Geary Street 2010 – in progress
Matt Magee Division 2009
Estelle Thompson Four Rectangles (for KM) 2009
Contact:
Jane Bustin
Calligrams features four artists whose work explores contemporary paths of minimalist abstraction. The exhibition brings together UK-based painters Jane Bustin and Estelle Thompson with American artists Matt Magee and Kevin Finklea.
Calligrams poses questions about the challenge involved in reinventing non-representational genres. The artists work within traditional parameters of colour, form and support, yet each in individual ways extends them.
Echoes of Suprematism and Colour Field abstraction are evident in the work of Kevin Finklea and Estelle Thompson, in the use of geometric forms and the manipulation of ranges of complex, high-keyed colours.
Finklea’s recent paintings arise from memories of place and time and have moved off the two-dimensional picture plane into three-dimensional reliefs. The range and vocabulary of Finklea’s colour, whether the exclamatory blush of two contrasting pinks or the meditative quality of a light blue are focused and projected into space through these sculptural forms
.
The intense colours and re-worked surfaces of Estelle Thompson’s oils on panel bring to mind a range of associations from past traditions in painting, from the shimmering light of Renaissance frescos to the distressed surface of Jasper Johns ‘Flag’. Thompson’s nuanced surfaces act in counterpoint to her plays with geometric form, in which a simple division of a rectangle can offer myriad visual possibilities.
Matt Magee’s more emblematic paintings employ simple pictograms such as punctuation marks or numbers, as a way of incorporating language into the work under his own abstract terms. Formally satisfying simply as shapes, these signs are also weighted with exclamatory meaning and are held within surfaces of painterly marks.
Jane Bustin’s investigations into the potential for the abstract image to allude to emotional states or metaphorical ideas are closest perhaps to traditions of the sublime in abstraction. Exploring sources in literature, her recent series of works are made in response to Mallarmé’s volume of poems ‘’Pour Anatole un tombeau’. Employing a range of materials and supports the work has moved into the territory of installation where related paintings and text are sited in three-dimensional arrangements.
Jane Bustin is represented by the Eagle Gallery. Her most recent solo exhibition Unseen – A collaboration, took place at the British Library, London.
Kevin Finklea’s recent solo exhibition Memories are Uncertain Friends was held at Margaret Thatcher Projects, New York.
Matt Magee’s forthcoming solo show takes place at the Knoedler Gallery, New York.
Estelle Thompson is represented by the Purdy Hicks Gallery, where she had a solo show In 2009.
david gryn blog 