Morton Metropolis

DATES TO BE CONFIRMED SOON

Image:
Foggy Skies, 2010
Acrylic on canvas
130 x 130 x 12 cm

This Exhibition is an exciting opportunity to view established and emerging talent from the worlds of Painting, Photography and Sculpture. These are individual and unique artistic voices from diverse backgrounds. Artists including: Laing, Semple, Reguera and Shrive will be exhibiting alongside the innovative sculptor Sebastian Fisher and photographer Tim Hall.

The installation includes a large floor painting which depicts one of the primary source of the Amazon River. In an attempt to remind us of the world’s environmental problems, Elwes entices the viewer to connect with the work by walking across it, simultaneously creating an individual path whilst interacting with nature. The work, which is based on a grid that Elwes constructed at the source of the river using ropes and pegs, is comprised of 144 small paintings which have been seamlessly fitted together.
On the surrounding walls are the images of a woman asleep, naked and at one with her environment, integrated in the flora. Collectively, the installation illustrates the idea that the woman is a metaphor for the river and that both represent the source of life.

Stuart Semple, provocative image-maker, social commentator and visual spokesperson, is bringing his first UK show for three years to Morton Metropolis.
Happy House is an album of 11 large paintings underscored by Semple’s signature use of text, each work a self-contained story that also relates to the other pieces on show. Lifting the lid on the state of Britain today, his work shouts loudly and fluently in the vernacular of a young media soaked generation, depicting a world that is absorbing and exciting, yet precariously underpinned by the hollow daily cycle of tabloids, Hollywood movies, and endless media intrusion.

His exhibition at Morton Metropolis is the culmination of three years work. The paintings or events, as he calls them, combine the skill of his academic background with a fresh, unabashed sense of wonder. They are modern, meditative icons which draw the viewer into the mutual process of creation.

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow...and we should die of that roar that lies on the other side of silence. As it is the quickest of us walks about well- wadded with stupidity.

George Eliot, Middlemarch

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.