event

Private view for Hygge

Matthew Burrows, We do not represent artists, Mia Taylor, Barbara Kruger
24.May.07
6-9pm

Standpoint Gallery
Hygge
45 Coronet St
London N1 6HD
020 7739 4921
standpointgallery@btconnect.com
www.standpointlondon.co.uk
Tube Old Street, Liverpool Street, Shoreditch / Hoxton

Hygge is a Danish word without translation in the English language. It describes the soothing traditions of home - particularly the sensation of joy that Danes experience when coming into the warmth out of a cold night. Like Freud’s reading of the German heimlich / unheimlich, Hygge evokes ideas of nostalgia and cosiness, but with undercurrents of a dangerous familiarity, a claustrophobic unease.

The indefinability of the word Hygge is entirely appropriate to the practice of painting. The sense of invitation coupled with a kind of slippage and resistance to being pinned down is an integral part of making and looking at paintings. The artists here reach out towards something very human and familiar, simultaneously traversing the dangerous territories of uncertainty and the unknowable.

Matthew Burrows’ recent paintings describe an invented world, ‘Up-Down’, whose complex theological system precludes the inhabitants from ever touching the ground. Resembling some kind of adventure-playground utopia, the architecture and inhabitants of Up-Down emerge and fade from layers of translucent colour. The versatility and fluidity of his handling in these interrelated works (portraits, landscapes and details) builds a compelling view of a secret geography.