Sebastian Fisher spent his childhood years in both Andalucia and England. After attending art school in London in the late 70’s Sebastian pursued a number of different occupations all related to art and design and traveling frequently between London , India , Spain, and Morocco. Settling in Andalucia in 1989 he began working in metal, initially as a designer and later learning the art of blacksmithing and setting up a workshop in 1994 The methods Sebastian used are largely traditional with the majority of the work being hand forged, and all being produced by himself and his skilled assistants. Much of the inspiration behind the work comes from a love and appreciation of the natural world and from many years spent living in the Spanish countryside, but also from a deep understanding of the sacred elements in Islamic and Indian art, and of the reverance for nature that infuses both these traditions. This is particularly relevant in Sebastian’s more recent departure into painting and sculptural work.
Sebastian’s sculpture is an exploration of both natural form and a reflection of his own inner quest for meaning and beauty. He has a fascination with the alchemical process of transforming iron through fire into forms representative of the divine manifestation and the creative process inherent in nature and the beauty of inspired imagination.
Born in 1980, Stuart Semple is a British painter whose work can be found in major international art collections. He has exhibited worldwide, curated for leading institutions and writes for national publications.
Building on his success as a painter Semple has collaborated on artistic projects with Umbro, Moncler, The Prodigy, Selfridges and Levis. In 2009, he held an artistic performance, "HappyCloud", at the Tate Modern, where he sent eco-friendly smiley pink clouds towards the recession bitten city. He also held solo exhibitions in Hong Kong, New York and Italy.
During 2007's Frieze Art Fair, Semple's solo exhibition "Fake Plastic Love" achieved record breaking sales and attendance figures. Staged in the 8000 sq ft blacked out Truman Brewery with rock concert rigging and lighting were his gigantic billboard scale canvases.
Semple's curatorial projects, “The Black Market” in NYC and “MashUps” at the Design and Artists Copyright Society in London achieved critical acclaim.
Ten years ago Hampel gave up work as a journalist, copywriter and crossword compiler to study art in Florence. There he received a classical atelier training and then continued to base himself in Italy, working figuratively in oils. He has exhibited widely and completed many commissions, mainly portrait and landscape in Europe and the US. Today, he lives and works in Berlin.
Rupert Shrive will give new meaning to the word ‘portrait’ at his show at Morton Metropolis, London’s most talked about gallery in the West End. In an insightful interview with Michael Peppiatt, biographer of Francis Bacon and author of a forthcoming book on Alberto Giacometti, the art historian describes the works as
“Very tender, sensitive things, as if you’re peeling back the skin of appearance to show the strangeness of a human face and the head beneath.” But it is not portraiture as we know it.
There are two parts to this exhibition. In the first, the artist expresses his interest in extending the life of a two dimensional painting. A classically trained artist, Shrive takes his great passion for portraiture to “another place, another level – to find another lease for it” which he does by crushing up a finished portrait, literally. Sometimes things go wrong, but very often he creates in a series of movements a new image which “just seems to assert itself.” In this process, Shrive takes care to preserve the features: he wants to be able to see the eyes, and he wants to make an image that the spectator has to walk around.
Shrive’s works are very contemporary in feel, and yet El Greco is the artist whose work is most in his mind when he creates the crushed paintings: he wants to reproduce the knack El Greco has to “catch your eye as you walk past, they’re flickering flames of composition that take your eye up, heavenwards”.
The second part of the exhibition was kick-started at the last Venice Biennale where Shrive was inspired by the work of Robert Rauschenberg, who had composed structures on the wall from things he had picked up in a junk yard. Shrive’s artistic response to this was to re-configure portraits that he had not turned into one of the crushed paintings and which lay around his studio. Instead of throwing them out, he started playing around and reassembling them until he found a harmony between the parts, “where they lock together”.
A foreword on Rupert Shrive is written by Michael Peppiatt who spent time with Rupert at his studio beside the Canal Saint-Martin in Paris. Shrive and Peppiatt have lived and worked in many of the same places, from Soho to Spain, Venice to Paris.
As one of the original wave of Pop artists Gerald Laing produced some of the most significant works of the British Pop movement. In London during the early 60s he pioneered the painting of enormous canvases based on newspaper photographs of models, astronauts and film stars. His 1962 portrait of Brigitte Bardot is an iconic work of the period and regularly features in major Pop retrospectives alongside Lincoln Convertible from 1964, a commemoration of the assassination of JFK.
After a period living and working in New York he returned to the Highlands of Scotland in 1969 to concentrate on sculptural work. Initially exploring abstraction and sculpture in the landscape, he moved on to figurative sculpture with the Galina series. High profile public commissions during this period included the Twickenham Stadium figures and the bronze bas-relief twin dragons at the exits of London's Bank station. His portrait work included heads of Luciano Pavarotti, Paul Getty, Sam Wanamaker (at the Globe Theatre) and Andy Warhol.
When the Abu Ghraib prison torture photographs began to appear in the press in 2003, Laing, a former British army officer, saw that his 60s starlets and all-American heroes had somehow become the perpetrators of horrific war crimes. This prompted him to return to a version of his early style depicting these one-time heroes of the American Dream in a grimmer contemporary light with the War Paintings series.
His return to painting has also seen a return to the contemporary media images that inspired his early work, with new paintings depicting Amy Winehouse, Kate Moss and Victoria Beckham.
