| Century Gallery | |
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ACAVA,
1-15 Cremer Street, Shoreditch, London E2 8HD
Contemporary fine art in an artist-run gallery |
| Interesting
and Successful Nov 27 - Dec 7, 2002 Stefan Bottenberg, Damon Summersgill, Geoff Swan | paintings | space 2 |
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| Geoff
Swan writes:
We are three painters who have interacted throughout the last decade without as yet having shown together, despite our obvious affinities. However, having each now built up a substantial body of work, we have decided to remedy said situation by exhibiting together. Our work is characterised by a common commitment to the figurative, by the use of snapshots and images culled from the media and by a focus on the more usual elements of the everyday. Whilst being aware of contemporary art discourse we would tend to reject it as a motivation in itself for the work of art, preferring instead to focus on the sensual, healing, and meditative functions that art has performed for human beings throughout human history. It is this latter meditative aspect in particular that we would see as uniting the sometimes disparate elements of our work in much the same way as say, for example, the seemingly dichotomous elements of the work of Edward Hopper are united by key elements within his thought. For behind the ordinariness of sheds, Belgian villas, and pets of Stefan's work; the brooding seascapes, domestic 'genre paintings', and nervous benignity of Damon's work; the cars, weaponry, and industrial gothic of my own work lies what I would describe as a form of non-discursive surrealism, evidences of a generalised practice of allowing the psychological underlay of the ordinary to emerge via the tension between a deliberately unsophisticated, limited input and a total openness to the dictates of the paint surface. |
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