Private View: THURSDAY 12 FEBRUARY 2009, 6-8 PM 13 February - 14 March 2009 Opening times: Tue-Sat 10-6
Sculptures are not for touching except with our eyes - much subtler than our fingers anyway - but our haptic sense is troubled by these wild surfaces, representing fur or flesh [...] Nicola Hicks starts from the reality of figures and animals, and captures the living truth of them with extraordinary vividness even though she chooses, in the materials she uses in making most of her sculptures, not to stay with mere visual fact. She moves on, out of sheer love I think, to personalise her subjects and give them roles on the mental stage of her studio. These roles are mysterious, close to ancient myths, but interventions that must be wholly her own.
Norbert Lynton, 2003.
Nicola Hicks is clear about the way she likes her sculpture to work. At a distance it must engage the eye. Close up, the actual making, her expansive techniques - must sustain the viewer. This exhibition brings together almost two decades of Hicks' work in bronze: depictions that move between figure and fauna, launching a shattering assault on the imagination by conveying a colossal psychic presence, whilst revealing intricate hatchings suggestive of an unsettling physical fragility. Here, large-scale work from the 1990s and the last decade lead the eye - and the curiosity of the haptic/optic 'viewer' - into a mythical world in which the artist's 'mental stage' is reconfigured as the dazzling phantasmagoria of the Circus.
Nicola Hicks was born in London in 1960. She studied at Chelsea School of Art and completed postgraduate studies at the Royal College of Art. She has had several major solo shows in leading museums and galleries in Britain, most recently at the prestigious Abbot Hall Gallery in Kendal.
For further information or images please contact Ellie Harrison-Read at Flowers East on 020 7920 7777 or email ellie @flowerseast.com
BOYD & EVANS BLACK & WHITE
Private View: THURSDAY 12 FEBRUARY 2009, 6-8 PM
On encountering Boyd & Evans' photographs, the viewer is presented with images that press against the confines of our vision, transporting us to sometimes inexplicable vantage points and encircling us with excessive vistas. We marvel at the vast, sometimes lonely, spaces which their photographs capture - spaces that exist beyond the overpopulated environs of our quotidian experience. Over the course of their career, Boyd & Evans have developed an acute understanding of how photographs can be re-worked to convey the essence and substance of a landscape; that dimension which may otherwise only materialise the mind's eye or as pigment laid down on canvas. In this new body of work, space is re-imagined through an optic that is at once reductive - in that it excludes colour - and at the same time the starting point for an enriched visual vocabulary. As the artists explain:
Our interest in photography as an art form began with exposure to the American colourists (Stephen Shore, Joel Meyerowitz, William Eggleston) in the 1970's. We are resistant to the school of thought which maintains that black and white is somehow more artistic than colour. However, it does offer unique ways of presenting images. Some pictures lend themselves more to monochrome than colour, perhaps because of the distribution of tones and hues, or maybe because of the subject.
Black and white silver gelatin prints have a much wider spectrum of tones than InkJet prints, and now, being able to make them from a digital file gives us a new medium which is at the same time a traditional one. The bright, intense shades and deep blacks give them such clarity and an almost hyperreal look. How you translate the black and white into the coloured world of the imagination is very personal. With the right image, the viewer is taken to another place, a combination of the photographer's vision and the viewer's interpretation.
Boyd & EvansJanuary 2009
All photographs in this exhibition will be printed by Metro Imaging, London: www.metroimaaing.co.uk
For further information or images please contact Ellie Harrison-Read at Flowers East on 020 7920 7777 or email ellie @flowerseast.com
