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Gimpel Fils: Jenny Watson: Striped Paintings and Undercover - 27 July 2011 to 26 Aug 2011 Current Exhibition |
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Jenny Watson Striped Paintings and Undercover 27 July - 26 August 2011 Private view: Wednesday 27 July, 6-8pm Gallery closed Saturdays throughout August A ballerina, a murderous psychopath, the rear end of a horse and a girl-about-town populate Jenny Watson’s new paintings. These characters are not portraits per-se, but rather they each embody an emotion, sensation or desire felt by Watson at one time or another. Watson’s tragic heroines both surprise and amuse, speak of wilful rebellion and debilitating self-doubt. Her horses stand as possible escape routes from a life of suburban boredom, the figure from the film A Clockwork Orange becomes both an aspiration and a warning. Jenny Watson’s paintings draw together the complex and humdrum elements of everyday life. Taking her Australian suburban childhood as a main point of departure, the paintings presented in Striped Paintings and Undercover exhibit an uncompromising examination of human nature and explore the boundaries of imagination. Rejecting literal depictions, her sketchy female archetypes convey the artist’s alter-ego and are complemented by separate, (sometimes) autobiographical texts. Like her figures, these stream-of-consciousness text panels are hard to pin down. Containing elusive sentences, humorous phrases, and melancholic stories, they encourage free association between image, language and memory. Watson has described her work as ‘post-conceptual.’ As a student in the 1970s Watson found that the limited, confining aesthetic (such as it was) of conceptual art was too restrictive for the messy, awkward scenes of everyday life that she wanted to depict. However, in her newest paintings Watson seems to have the last laugh. Her figures are painted on deck chair canvas, of thick blue and white stripes and appear to have just stumbled into an installation by Daniel Buren: the crisp stripes become contaminated with the scratchy, scrawly and sassy characters that deny the visual disinterestedness of high-conceptualism. Jenny Watson is one of Australia’s most important contemporary artists. She has exhibited extensively since 1973, and in 1993 she represented Australia at the Venice Biennale. In 2003 Watson held a major solo exhibition at the Yokohama Museum of Art in Japan. She has been selected for numerous important group exhibitions and biennales both in Australia and internationally. Watson’s works are held in every major public collection in Australia as well as many public and corporate collections overseas. A major solo retrospective exhibition Here, There and Everywhere will open at the Ian Potter Museum, Melbourne, 17 November 2011. This is Jenny Watson’s third solo exhibition at Gimpel Fils. Gimpel Fils 30 Davies StreetLondon W1K 4NB www.gimpelfils.com |
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