exhibition

Hygge

Artists Matthew Burrows, Mia Taylor, Roxy Walsh, Oliver Perkins

25.May.07 - 23.Jun.07
Wed-Sat 12-6

Private View, 24.May.07, 6-9pm

Standpoint Gallery
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 the Danes experience when coming home into the warmth out of a cold night. Akin to the Freudian double reading of heimlich/unheimlich, this word evokes ideas of nostalgia and cosiness but with undercurrents of a dangerous familiarity, a claustrophobic unease.

The indefinability of the word 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. In the artists chosen for this show there is an overt reaching out towards something very human and familiar, coupled with an edge of complete unknowableness, the dangerous territory of uncertainty.

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.

Matthew Burrows (Royal College 1995) has shown extensively in the UK and internationally. A prizewinner in John Moores 24,
Burrows solo show Up-Down was at Eagle Gallery in 2006.

Oli Perkins’ semiautomatic drawings build up a diverse catalogue of images and words that fold into paintings. The gap between the verbal and the visual, between known and unknown, is the motivating force in a practice which avoids ‘expert thinking’. The freshness and immediacy of his works on paper is translated in the large oil paintings into a rendering of process - a visible thinking - which is powerful and direct.

Having trained and exhibited widely in New Zealand, Oli Perkins graduated from Chelsea MA in 2005 and now lives and works in London.

Mia Taylor uses painting and landscape to explore ideas of time and duration. Her images hover between the surface and depth of the canvas, possessing at once lightness and a deep and grounded sense of place. Architectural forms and suggestions of human presence float over subtle gradations of tone, collaging the transience and distraction of urban humanity onto the historical framework of painterly and geographical space.

Mia Taylor (MA Chelsea 2005) showed in East End Academy 2004 (Whitechapel Gallery) and was selected for the Jerwood Contemporary Painting Award 2007.

Roxy Walsh combines a rare intense delicacy in her use of materials (watercolour on canvas, board, paper or wall) with a subversive, transformative panoply of imagery. The paintings play with visual expectations as poetry plays with our expectations of words, shifting direction just when you think that you know what you are looking at. Flippant, feisty and profound, her work is grounded in the abstract, but inflected with figurative speech.

Roxy Walsh’s recent solo show Felix Culpa toured from Domo Baal, London, to Newcastle (2006), Cincinnatti and Bratislava (2007). She is a lecturer in Fine Art at Kingston University.