CROSSING BOUNDARIES 19 – 30 Oct 2022
curated by Polly Townsend
APT Gallery, 6 Creekside Deptford London, SE84SA
This exhibition is the first of its kind to explore contemporary landscape painting exclusively through the female gaze. The diverse group of painters each innovate within the genre, pushing the boundaries of this historically male dominated field. The exhibition helps address the significant gender disparity in this area of painting for centuries and up to the modern day and helps form a more collective story.
The artists examine landscape painting techniques, concepts, aesthetic sensibilities & their inherent relationship with the medium. They look at how the real meets the imagined, plein air versus studio, and how the specific and the abstract can interact. The exhibition also examines how working outdoors, unaccompanied, impacts choice of location and the artists’ full immersion in a landscape and its ongoing changes.
The artists have a variety of approaches to landscape painting. Joanna Whittle makes intimate paintings that touch on the sensuous handling of the romantics, whilst connecting with the history of miniatures. Her small almost hallucinogenic paintings are alongside the enveloping watery landscapes of Amanda Ansell whose work is similarly sensuous but handled abstractly via simple forms and wide overlays of colour.
In the figurative painting tradition, Hannah Brown’s work centres on the psychology of the English landscape, the status of landscape painting, the use and value of bucolic imagery. Polly Townsend’s work draws on solitary journeys in remote and hostile landscapes and presents a view of the world beyond the familiar.
Rebecca Partridge makes work that, on first glance appears abstract, but is in fact acutely observed and objective, while Zoe Benbow accumulates fragments of observations to bring together the real and the imagined.