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Press Release
| Beyond the Gaze - Reclaiming the Landscape |
| Emma Bennett, Kiera Bennett, Kirsty Harris, Dannielle Hodson, Lisa Ivory, Melissa Kime, Joanna Whittle |
| Curated by Zavier Ellis |
| SAATCHI GALLERY, London |
| PRIVATE VIEW: Thursday 13 July 6:30-8:30pm | RSVP | Limited places available | Please click here to confirm attendance |
| EXHIBITION DATES: Friday 14 July – Monday 28 August 2023 |
| EXHIBITION HOURS: Monday – Sunday 10am-6pm |
| ADDRESS: Saatchi Gallery, Duke of York's HQ, King's Rd, London SW3 4RY |
| WEBSITE: saatchigallery.com |
SALES ENQUIRIES: direct@charliesmithlondon.com |
| Beyond the Gaze – Reclaiming the Landscape explores contemporary landscape painting by women painters and seeks to subvert the historical tendencies of a male dominated genre. Throughout history, women have often been portrayed in landscape paintings as passive or idealized subjects, rather than active participants in the scene. Male artists typically depicted women as muses, workers, or symbols of nature, representing beauty, purity, and innocence. Women were often depicted in a state of undress, with flowing hair and delicate features, creating an image of femininity that was both vulnerable and alluring. Depictions were largely idealized and objectified, with little agency or power given to the female subjects. In this exhibition women artists—none of whom would consider themselves to be landscape painters in a traditional sense—seize ownership of the genre by exploring activity that takes place within a landscape, and in doing so define the worldview from their own perspective. Each artist approaches the subject distinctively, and in combination explore landscape as an arena for human endeavour; nature as memento mori; the imaginary; the ritualistic; and the archaic. Emma Bennett references landscape as an art historical genre in a similar manner to her still-life and nautical paintings. Her recent large-scale pieces offer dislocated reminiscences of time and space when outside, exposed to inclement weather. Bennett makes use of the laws of gravity and velocity as part of the process of making, which recalls feelings of fear and ferocity when exposed. In her most recent painting, she revisits fire as a recurring motif. Operating as memento mori, Bennett recalls the images of multiple funeral pyres that were broadcast during the Covid pandemic, refencing death, beauty, ritual, fear and the transitory. Kiera Bennett works in series and her semi-abstract ‘Plein Air’ paintings are a recurring theme. She deliberates on what it is to be a painter today by addressing romantic notions around the artist stereotype and day-to-day activity of what that could be—making marks, unruly behaviour, solitude, competition, self-doubt, absurdity and obsession. Referencing Modernist styles and depicting the act of making, Bennett paints about painting, and in this series questions verisimilitude by making en plein air paintings inside. Kirsty Harris depicts the most iconic man-made event that might take place in a landscape—detonation of the atom bomb. Often working at scale, Harris confronts her audience with a vison of awe and beauty. Mushroom clouds hang over desolate expanses of the Nevada desert, provoking contemplation at the intersection of humanity, brutality, technology and nature. Harris’ practice is steadfast—her paintings are informed by deep research, and this arduous process is echoed in depictions of a split-second event painted over a period of several months. Dannielle Hodson’s densely populated canvases are made entirely from the imagination. Figurative elements emerge from abstract mark-making, evolving quickly into all-over figuration. Hodson maintains a heightened sense of pareidolia (the psychological phenomenon that causes people to see patterns in a random stimulus) that is evident in every phase of her work. Informed by Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of the ‘carnivalesque’, Hodson’s paintings are celebratory revelations of suppressed libidinal energies, encompassing fear, desire and self-preservation. Lisa Ivory’s landscapes are commonly occupied by a Wildman, who occasionally interacts with a female human figure. These exchanges occur in a shadowland—a liminal space of a half-forgotten landscape that exists simultaneously as rural, urban and wasteland. The beast is often overpowered by the human character, frequently being led in chains. Ivory’s landscapes are archaic in tone and her archetypal subjects present a paradoxical discourse including the feral and tamed; the worshipped and abandoned; the empowered and the subjugated. Melissa Kime explores folkloric traditions of the British Isles, where ancient motifs are adopted to represent the natural rhythm of the land, populated by communal groups engaged in everyday or esoteric ritual such as sewing, stitching or spell making. Kime places herself as a character within landscapes, embellishing and mythologising her own everyday life. Reality and dream coalesce to create haunted landscapes in epic tableaux that are uniquely visionary. Joanna Whittle makes intimate landscapes that fuse the everyday and the arcane. They are unpopulated scenes that signal the activity of people—crepuscular solitary marquees, somewhat melancholy in their concealment of the inferred party or performance; or shrines that rise from wooded trees. With her use of single point perspective, Whittle invites her audience to look and wonder. This sense of the voyeuristic creates a tension between observing, participating and imagining, where the viewer is invited into the scene, at a distance. The exhibition will take place at SAATCHI GALLERY, Duke of York's HQ, King's Rd, London SW3 4RY from Friday 14 July to Monday 28 August 2023. For further information please contact direct@charliesmithlondon.com. Follow us @CHARLIESMITHIdn Please contact direct@charliesmithlondon.com for images and further information |