Featured work: ‘Sanctuary’, Harriet Porter, Oil on canvas, 60 x 60cm, 2024
Blue Shop Gallery presents
'In Absentia'
A group show | Gallery 1
11th - 28th July 2024
PV Drinks Wednesday 10th July 6-9pm
72 Brixton Road, Oval SW9 6BH
Gallery opening hours: Wed - Sun | 11am - 6pm
Joshua Armitage
Charlotte Brisland
Deirdre Byrne
Phoebe Evans
Miho Ichise
Clara Bull Nielsen
Harriet Porter
Louise Wallace
Charlie Yates
‘In Absentia’ gathers work depicting inhabited spaces absent of the human figure. This absence allows an unnoticed corridor, a recently opened window or a discarded jug to become the painting’s subject. By paying close attention to these backdrops of human activity, the works in this show evoke the way memory and association become powerfully integrated into the environments and objects we live in and around.
Throughout the show, there is a focus on light, capturing the reflection of daylight on silverware, or the patterned shadow of light through a curtain. By pausing to consider these often unnoticed details that surround us, these paintings evoke the brief moments of contemplation that mark an interruption to our everyday routine.
An absence of the human figure does not mean an absence of human presence. The figure is present indirectly: a carefully assembled paper chain placed in afternoon light; the recent placing of a teapot on a table; a staircase leading up to an open door; a distant house engulfed in a wild, surreal landscape. Witnessing these simple traces of human activity can often invoke the most powerful experiences of personal connection and mutual understanding.
Perhaps it is the pervasive sense of memory across this show that entails the dreamlike quality to so many of the works on display. By removing the human as subject, the viewer is brought into closer contact with the artist, in their intimate moments of reflection, memory, and solitude. Whilst the figure in these works is ultimately 'In Absentia', we cannot avoid the undeniable expression and therefore presence of the artist.
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‘Glimpse’, Phoebe Evans, 50 x 40cm, Oil on canvas, 2024
Exhibiting Artists:
Joshua Armitage (b. Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, 1986) lives and works in London. Armitage works primarily with painting and drawing. His painting practice is concerned with the intersections of observation, memory and feeling, combining sensory experience with various approaches to applying paint in the hope of conveying, replicating or conjuring remembered experiences from his past. His work has a particular interest in place and often looks at how architecture is imbued with spirituality, memory and feeling.
Notable exhibitions include Dialogues No.01 at the Centre for Recent Drawing, London UK, a presentation at Sunday Painter gallery as part of Condo 2020, curated by Lulu gallery Mexico City, “Hope” is the thing with feathers at South Parade, Deptford, London and Moderato Cantabile at Stoppenbach and Delestre, London. Most recently Josh has worked on a self initiated residency project with Wakefield based artist Zoë Carlon resulting in a publication and exhibition in Leeds and London.
Charlotte Brisland (b.1978) is a Contemporary British Painter living and working in the UK. Brisland graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2004 and has exhibited internationally including Japan, New York, London and Berlin. Brisland has exhibited in group and solo exhibitions including the Barbican centre, London and Agora gallery in New York. During this time she has won awards including the Jackson’s Painting Prize and the National Open and has been interviewed in Floorr and Create magazine. Charlotte Brisland currently lives and works in the UK where she lectures and paints. This ongoing body of work centres on isolation and fiction as fragmented reality, playing with paint and colour as forms of seduction. The paintings play with the necessary push and pull of the double sidedness of beauty and storytelling.
Deirdre Byrne (b. 1981) divides her time between Wexford and Seville. She holds a BA in Fine Art, Painting, and a Postgraduate Diploma in Visual Art Education from the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. Her works have been exhibited internationally. Her latest solo exhibition, ´The Long Way Round`, took place in May at Custom House Studios and Gallery in Westport, Ireland. Her work has also been commissioned for public spaces including ´High Flyers` at Dublin Airport, and ´Passages` at dlr Lexicon, Dun Laoghaire, Dublin. Her current series of drawings on wood combine research into landscape and a sense of place with a love of experimenting with materials and colour. The exhibition, ´In Absentia`, marks the first time her work has been shown with a London gallery.
Phoebe Evans (b. 2000) is a painter living and working in London. Her practice utilises magic realism to draw on the process of the sublime and the liminal. Harmonizing colour and exploring perspective, the environments become a fantasy of reality. The attention to atmosphere and tonality, however, is what pushes these paintings away from the known and into an abstract space. The beguiling hues and soft brushwork shifts the work to the concept of limitlessness and the endless possibility of dreaming minds.
Miho Ichise (b.1969) was born in Saitama, a suburb of Tokyo. After having worked several years in a bank she went to France to study drawing and painting in art studios. She eventually got a BA in Fine Art Painting from Chelsea College of Arts in London in 2002. She has recently exhibited at Scroll nyc, New York (two person, 2024), Woaw gallery, Singapore (group, 2024), Cob gallery, London (group, 2023), Jennings Kerr, Australia (solo, 2023) and Painters Painting Paintings (online solo, 2022). She now lives and works in Fukuoka, Japan.
Clara Bull Nielsen (b.2001) was born in Copenhagen, Denmark and grew up in England where she completed a BA in Fine Art painting at Camberwell College of Arts in 2024. She has previously partaken in group shows at the Bomb Factory Art Foundation in Covent Garden in 2023 and Southwark Park Galleries in 2024. Currently residing and working in southwest London, Clara's body of work is an exploration of place, history, and memory through a combination of oil painting and photography. Her artistic practice delves into the intricate relationship between these mediums, creating a dialogue that blurs the boundaries between reality and recollection.
Harriet Porter (b. 1960) grew up and was educated in the Cotswolds. After completing an Art Foundation Diploma in Oxford, she went on to study BA Graphic Design at Central St. Martins. She has shown her work widely in the past 10 years and exhibited regularly at the Stratford Gallery in Wiltshire; at Cameron Contemporary in Brighton as well as two solo shows at Beaux Arts in Bath. Selected for The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition for the last three years, she has twice been singled out as one of Time Out’s highlights of the show: to quote Eddy Frankel, Time Out’s art editor, “[Porter’s] small still lives of silver pots are so simple but so haunting, quiet and precise. They’re these ghostly, almost mournful acts of meditation.” Porter has lived in Brixton, South London, for 30 years, where she travels to her nearby studio and continues her ongoing obsession with painting solitary reflective vessels from observation, using the natural light that spills in to this peaceful sanctuary.
Louise Wallace (b. 1970 Belfast) is an artist, writer and educator. She is the winner of the Oil Award, Jackson's Art Prize (2024) and was shortlisted for the BEEP Painting Prize (2022) and longlisted for the John Moore's Painting Prize (2020).
Charlie Yates (b. 1996) is a Scottish artist based in Edinburgh. Having graduated from The Glasgow School of Art in 2019, Charlie became the youngest partnered artist of the Open Eye Gallery in Edinburgh. He had a solo show at the Open Eye Gallery from the 1st to the 22nd of July in 2023. He was recently featured in "The Scotsman" for starting the Artist in Residence Program at The Virgin Hotels Edinburgh in April 2024. He was also mentioned in "The Times" for a large solo show at the Watermill Gallery in Aberfeldy, where he exhibited 43 paintings for six weeks in 2022. After winning the Aon Community Art Award out of 130 artists in 2021, Charlie recently finished his third Artist in Residence with Loretto School, where he taught for seven weeks.
Specializing in oil paint and installation, Yates's art has evolved to focus on the essence of each moment experienced in diverse locations. His practice involves a continual interrogation of materials and images, often resulting in scenes left deliberately undetermined. This leads to atmospheric, nostalgic, and evocative interpretations of cherished experiences. For example, his painting "Fushimi Inari" is characterized by a monochromatic palette, which conjures a sense of being 'somewhere else' and captures the exotic light of his experience in Japan. Yates's ability to capture the essence of each moment in foreign locations mirrors a sense of adventure and discovery, inviting viewers to interpret and question what is in front of them.
Summer Event:
COLLAGE CLUB at Blue Shop Gallery
Wednesday, July 24 · 7 - 8:30pm | £16pp
Everyone Welcome
BOOK TICKETS
Taking inspiration from the current exhibition ‘In Absentia’, the workshop will explore dream interiors, calming spaces, and the details that often go unnoticed in the environments we inhabit.
Guests will be invited to delve into a curated selection of the very best found imagery, magazines, papers, shapes and more, transforming them into brilliant collages artworks to take home and treasure.
Whether you're brand new to the art-form, or are rekindling your love for it, a Collage Club workshop is just the ticket. The session will begin with a couple of speedy warm ups, before guests get to work on their own themed compositions using high-quality materials from the Collage Club studio. There will also be a chance to explore both exhibitions on show at Blue Shop Gallery.
Switch off from the day-to-day and leave the session with beautiful cut and paste artworks. No prior experience is needed and all abilities are welcome.