Gnomonics, an Orange and Other Drawings

ELENA ALONSO | SARA ANSTIS | SARAH DWYER | CHRISTIAN HIDAKA | JOHNNY IZATT-LOWRY | KILIAN RÜTHEMANN | NEAL TAIT | RAPHAËL ZARKA

15 December to 29 January 2022 

Exhibited artworks

PRESS RELEASE
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At the end of the year and away from the hustle and bustle, we present a small but fine exhibition in our downstairs gallery with new works on paper by seven exceptional artists.

Amongst it are sketches by Sara Anstis which draw on the artist’s imaginary elusive worlds that have inspired her recent paintings and a new laborious, layered colour pencil drawing by Johnny Izatt-Lowry. Izatt-Lowry’s works invoke subtly surreal depictions of everyday things. At first familiar in their quiet domesticity, there is something a little unnerving in their awkward perspectives and plays on pictorial representation. In “A Still Life on a Table”, the premise is at first uncomplicated, described simply in the works title. It shows carefully positioned objects on a table, with a jarring perspective in which we are looking at it from above but also as if it is sloping away from us. Who’s desk is it?

At the bottom of the stairs are two works hung, one by Elena Alonso and one by Kilian Rüthemann. Alonso presents a new version of her populated volume drawings – not quite architectural representation, nor persona, and yet they are irreconcilably both.  The photograph “Far scratch (https://mars.nasa.gov/re- sources/5295/cumberland-tar- get-drilled-by-curiosity)”, 2021 by Kilian shows the moment after a drilling into a rock and, despite the impression of being an archaic act, is a product of the most elaborate technology in existence: it is evidence of the first act by mankind after they managed to place a robot on plan- et Mars. A penetration salutary for a planet that has never been visited before. Near-obsolete analogue photography is used to produce this irrationally unique reproduction of a digital image readily available online.

To the left you face a grid of Raphael Zarka’s latest delicately multi-colored ink drawings. They belong to a body of works by the artist composed of sculptures and drawings called “The Gnomonic Sculptures”. Gnomonic is the word for the study of sundials. The sundials he is interested in are multisided geometrical objects, as opposed to flat ones, the shapes of which go from rather simple polyhedras to highly complexe pre-cubists or constructivists sculptures conceived in Europe between the 15th and the 18th century. The «Floris Studies» here refer to a specific multi-sided version and is a detail from a drawing by the flemish painter Frans Floris (1519-1570).

Moving down the gallery space: diverse in palette and composition, Neal Tait’s drawings explore tensions between the figurative and the abstract, the beautiful and the grotesque, the logical and the absurd. His recent body of work takes unmediated material - either from his imagination and memory, or from direct observation - as a source, serving as a starting point for intuitive, potentially unexpected compositions led by catching a Zeitgeist. 

Christian Hidaka’s drawings spread on all three walls continue to explore the relationship between theatre, the history of images and the art of memory (Ars memorativa - which is the method of storing information by using images). He uses this to generate and synthesise new images a greater purpose. Ultimately it is a synthesis of Eastern and Western traditions by treating painting as a form of Cabala. For example, the figure in “Untitled (Saltimbanque)” is taken from Picasso’s ‘family of saltimbanques’. He carries the drum used to attract an audience. Picasso’s painting was made in 1905 and Hidaka clothed this figure in the acrobat’s costume from ‘Parade’, 1917. So this image is a synthesis/memory image of these two moments that bookend cubism, one of Hidaka’s main locations of interest.

On the left wall looking down the space hangs Sarah Dwyer's latest drawing “The Doodler”. It is an exuberant re-imagination of bodily forms, rooted in her regular commitment to life drawing sessions. Executed with a mischievously subversive approach to painting and drawing, her composition reflects live subjects through playful linework and vivid, robust colour.