Casting Light
Alex Lowery & Graeme Williams:
Painting West Bay, Photographing South Africa
6-29 June 2019
Art First in residence @ Eagle Gallery
159 Farrington Road, Clerkenwell, London EC1R 3A
Silent home exteriors, empty of human form but fully suggestive of occupancy and the man-made is the subject matter of both artists, working in two completely different contexts and mediums.
For Alex Lowery, Dorset’s West Bay and the island of Portland have been leitmotifs in his practice for over two decades. The marine light pervading all his work suggests the sea, while describing the forms that exist at its edge; piers, jetties, warehouses and sea front houses. His reductive, modernist approach creates a distinctive meditative beauty, tinged with poetic melancholy and subtlety.
Graeme Williams, on the other hand, has worked on an extensive series of photographic essays recording the rapidly changing landscape of South Africa following the end of Apartheid rule in 1994. Painting Over the Present and Scratching the Surface are the essays from which this group of photographs has been selected, and in which Williams focuses on peoples’ homes in environments occupied by some of South Africa’s poorest people.
“The bright colours act as visual trinkets to distract the viewer from harsh external realities and the pain of a life of subsistence. However, although they encourage denial, they are also suggestive of resilience and hope, and a sense of humanity that is retained in these poverty-stricken communities."
Unexpected formal analogies between the paintings and photographs become evident, making for a a conversation about looking, about responding and then subjecting the subject to the purifying, reductive process of composition and formal selection. Both artists have exhibited at Art First over the years and we are delighted to bring them together for the first time, hosted by Emma Hill of the first floor Eagle Gallery in Clerkenwell, where we have had the pleasure of being guest exhibitors over the past three years.
