13 – 28 June 2014
Preview: Thursday 12 June, 6-9pm
Open: Thursdays – Sundays, 11am – 6pm
Alice Browne | Aaron Fickling | Alan Franklin | Jaya Mansberger
Eleanor Moreton | Luke Skiffington | Rosie Snell
OVADA has great pleasure in presenting Informal Elements, an exhibition celebrating painting as a contemporary art form that brings together the work of seven artists from Oxford, Shrivenham, London and Norwich who are either painters or who use the medium of paint in their work.
The OVADA Warehouse is a raw space that has been left untouched after many years of industrial use. Situated in the centre of Oxford, as a new contemporary art space it is as unusual as it is unexpected and it makes an exciting backdrop to its first painting exhibition.
Alice Browne, Luke Skiffington and Jaya Mansberger all work with abstraction but with very differing results. Eleanor Moretons figurative work uses the nature and process of paint to explore paradox within images drawn from art history or mythology. Rosie Snell reconfigures photographs of military installations using thick textured paint to achieve a high level of realism. Aaron Fickling uses geometric shapes to frame a painterly approach in two and three dimensions and has created a site-specific piece for this exhibition. Alan Franklin playfully uses paint as one of the many ‘materials’ that he explores. Themes and ideas behind the work in this exhibition range from camouflage to the sublime and from mythology to architecture. Differences in the working methods of the artists are as marked as the elements that unite them; they all grapple in different ways with a set of self-imposed parameters that they strive to resolve. These varied considerations are in many ways similar to the set of elements (formal or informal) that painters have grappled with down the centuries.
In addition to the paintings displayed in the main Warehouse space, there is an exhibition of works on paper by the artists in OVADA’s Grey Area gallery. This small exhibition allows us a rare insight into the vital role of drawing within the professional practice of painters. These works range from drawings as preparation for painting, drawings as a way of developing imagery, to drawings that are the end result of similar processes used in the creation of a painting.
Informal Elements Panel Discussion: 17 June 2014, 7pm
With Hanneke Grootenboer from Oxford University, Paul Hobson, Director of Modern Art Oxford, and Bev Broadhead from Paint Club East.
Tickets: £4.00 or free for OVADA Associates.
Booking strongly advised – please email: info@ovada.org.uk
VENUE: OVADA warehouse
FREE ADMISSION