The first stop will be at Standpoint for an exhibition of new paintings by Vincent Hawkins, Peter Ashton Jones and Fergal Stapleton. Anecdote of the Jar, an Imagist poem written in sonnet form, was published in Wallace Stevens’ first collection, Harmonium, in 1919. In this show, the jar is the artifice of ‘painting’ as a port – the support, the surface and pictorial space – at odds with the consciousness to arrest or tame the making, in the sense that the desire to make and realise the nature of a painting is a subconscious or a wild desire of the ego.
The route will now head to Hales for Heads, a solo exhibition of historic works by Anwar Jalal Shemza. The show displays Shemza’s early portraiture from the 1950s, a key period of experimentation sparked by his arrival in Britain. Never-before-exhibited in the UK, this rare body of work was last shown in 1961 at the Pakistan National Council of the Arts Gallery, Karachi. Heads coincides with Shemza’s inclusion in the International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, opening 20 April 2024.
The following stop is Acrylicize. The gallery will present ‘Otherscapes’, a duo exhibition by artists Sarita Oseitutu and Hazel O’Sullivan following their nine-week residency in our studio space. This exhibition springs from our collaboration with WCCD, where we welcome ten artists to utilise our studio for their respective creative practices throughout 2024.
Later, you will head to Sherbet Green for Interface by Luke Silva. The artist highly-stylised works, appropriate the medium of watercolour, re-deploying its associated delicacy and liquidity within a visual language that speaks to uncertainty, memory and internal thoughts. The resulting granular distribution of paint, in tandem with the pigments employed, carry a certain softness: a sense of vulnerability as much as of nostalgia. Often featuring imagery pulled directly from films, video games or the internet, the paintings assume the guise of gamified landscapes or memories, appearing to suspend or filter reality.
The last stop will be at Leo Costelloe’s solo show ‘Special Day’ at NEVEN, Leo Costelloe (b. 1993, Canberra) is a London-based, Irish-Australian interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the transient and sentimental nature of objects in contemporary culture. Drawing from a zeitgeist of digital femininity, Costelloe’s sculptural practice uses glass, silver, hair and more to infuse banal items with complex emotional and symbolic resonance, informed by the artist’s rural childhood in Australia and grinding coming-of-age in the East London queer scene. With recurring leitmotifs including bows, dolls, stars and flowers, Costelloe’s practice recasts familiar decorative signifiers to reframe an object’s presupposed meanings.
