Cure

Laura Bygrave, Brian Cheeswright, Alex Crocker, Grant Foster, Ed Hill, Marie Jacotey

From fragmentary forms to off-kilter compositions, “Cure” focuses on a type of image making which actively embraces distortion and deconstructed motifs. The resulting images act like an oblique reflection through a refracted mirror onto a wider quixotic world of references.

Laura Bygrave works with imagery from the basis of amplification through simplification. Thinking of cartoons as being hyper real versions of our reality Bygrave takes the distillation and distortion inherent in cartooning and makes paintings investigating the psychological effect of pictorial space. Her paintings are drawn from her fascination with Cubism, theories of higher dimensions, folk stories, witchcraft, feminism, sexuality, death and birth.

Before becoming an Artist, Brian Cheeswright studied History and this interest in time and interpretation is a connecting thread through his diverse output. It manifests in a questioning of accepted narratives, the idea that an Artist can ever really know what they are doing in advance and how certain ways and signifiers are ridiculed or ignored if they don’t fit certain rules within the architecture of a given moment. Brian Cheeswright is seeking to discover whether constructs like beauty, reverie and whimsy are really exhausted.

Grant Foster makes use of British Romantic Painting’s idealized depictions of pastoral settings to interrogate the role that images play in establishing and articulating our shared value systems, social norms and ideals. Subtle alterations to the subject matter disrupt our expectations of the genre and remind the viewer that tradition had a dark role as an instigator of cultural persuasion.

Ed Hill works in painting, drawing, ceramics and print. Although no one method is repeated, works are informed by personal memories, resonant experiences and narratives (blurring imagined and real), merged with a wide range of references. Among them, the natural world and phenomena, songs, medieval and primitive art, cultural artefacts, children’s art, comics and specific areas of art history are drawn upon in a celebratory spirit. Fundamentally Hill’s work explores and reflects on painterly and artistic traditions and conventions, his fascinations, personal world and psyche, the natural world and timeless human themes, observations and scenarios.

Marie Jacotey‘s work is anchored in her obsessive and indefatigable practice of drawing. From this originates every one of her pieces that in turn flirt with installation, painting, edition or even sculpture. Fundamentally, her work describes the difficulties of human relationships, notably through the depiction of women observed in their intimacy. How we deal with essential and existentialist subjects such as love and death in our everyday life fascinates her. In that regard, her narrative experimentations are very much inspired, alongside art, by comics, literature and cinema.

Alex Crocker is interested in the ideas of the ‘early’. Early in terms of the historical and early in terms of the beginnings of making a painting. Crocker questions ideas of the provisional and archetypal within painting whilst exploring the fundamental issues of painting; the relationship between figure and ground, line and form and the space between illusion and matter.

Gallery hours Fri/Sat 12 – 6 pm, Sunday by appointment

www.transitiongallery.co.uk

Location:
Transition Gallery
8 Andrews Road, Unit 25a (second floor) Regent Studios
E8 4QN London
United Kingdom