2022. 8. 3 – 10. 6
Nuno Gil, Dene Leigh, Lydia Makin and Ioana Maria Sisea

Gallery rosenfeld is proud to present four emerging artists: Nuno Gil, Dene Leigh, Lydia Makin and Ioana Maria Sisea as our next exhibition. The gallery has selected these contemporary voices because of the originality of their language combined with the desire to open up the gallery space to a new group of artists.

Portuguese artist Nuno Gil constructs his works using a myriad selection of cut outs the majority of which have also been painted as has the backdrop on which he has mounted them. Using a wide range of materials which also vary in depth helps him create an extraordinarily complex surface.

Looking at the complexity of each finished work which takes the artist three to four months to complete, it’s as if he has taken the universe of the late Matisse works which featured exclusively vibrantly coloured cut outs, and pushed that experiment with the language of art as far as it can go. The finished pictures are full of joy and the pure pleasure of creation.

Dene Leigh’s highly layered trompe d”oeil compositions represent the most poignant.and mysterious of voyages into personal memory. Apart from the cathartic release of working around such a profoundly personal subject, the richness of the constructions of each individual work enables the artist to take on this eighteenth century painterly tradition without paling into insignificance when confronted with his peers from the past, Refreshingly, his references,which are clearly contemporary, enables him to give new life to this tradition.

Inside his canvases we discover the many unfolding references to memory, which results in one taking on the role of detective as we try and interpret the work’s complex meaning. However, aside from the richness of the composition, the paintings are beautifully executed; the colour is rich and the line sure.

Lydia Makin’s swirling abstract canvases are a testimony to the endless possibilities, after all that’s happened in the history of art, to discover new gestures and rhythms to painting. There have been and still are so many ways of creating an abstract painting, yet with limited materials, artists have managed to discover fresh ways of utilising the very essentials of art: Oil Paint, a prepared canvas and the gestures and rhythms the artists uses when applying the paint.

There is a musicality in the artist’s works, achieved by the essence of ‘painting’; simply the way an artist applies the brush strokes to the prepared canvas. The colours are rich and full with various colours appearing, disappearing, and then reappearing again in the same composition.

Ioana Maria Sisea, who hails from Romania, in contrast to the other three artists in the exhibition, will show a series of small porcelain sculptures .Over the last few years, the artist has been working in various mediums, always around the concept of ‘desire’, although never with any pre-conceived moral viewpoint. Her sculptural scenes portray the physical expression of the ‘hedonism’ which she receives from the media and translates into a threedimensional form of art. Apart from the figures which we are showing in the exhibition, she has produced paintings and site-specific ‘happenings’ all relating to the same subject. Sisea has in mind 3 such ‘events’ although so far only one has been completed; the total licking of a shiny Rolls Royce.

Approaching a subject from various directions gives her works remarkable consistency and also gives her varied approach in different mediums an added richness.

The ceramic figures are both meaningful but also full of humour, illustrating the most noticeable situations exacerbated by a ‘money buys anything society’. The absence of moral judgement enables us to look at them as they are and decide for ourselves what they can say about ‘desire’ and the society which produces these extreme examples.

The exhibition will enable visitors to discover new artistic languages as well as the feeling that fascinating new artists are always out there on the horizon whose voices are waiting to be heard.

gallery rosenfeld
37 Rathbone Street, WC1T 1NZ, London. United Kingdom
+44 2076 371133

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