Tarka Kings
dal 4/5/2011 al 2/6/2011
Segnalato da
4/5/2011
Tarka Kings
Faggionato Fine Art, London
Lingua Franca. The show features a series of highly-worked large-scale drawings that begin with a single scene or image and progress into a formal exploration of mark-making and patterning. Comprising subtle tonal shifts achieved through intensely detailed textures, the drawings embody a balance between restraint and emotion.
Faggionato Fine Art is delighted to present Lingua Franca, an exhibition of new works by Tarka
Kings.
The show marks a new direction in Kings’ practice, comprising a series of highly-worked large-
scale drawings that begin with a single scene or image and progress into a formal exploration of
mark-making and patterning. Comprising subtle tonal shifts achieved through intensely detailed
textures, the drawings embody a balance between restraint and emotion. Figureless scenes are
imbued with tension through finely wrought surfaces, contrasts in medium and fragments of text.
Lingua Franca refers to the polyglot creole spoken on the Mediterranean trading routes, a
unifying language derived from multiple sources. Thus the works demonstrate a diversity of
imagery, influence and technique: I Want You and I Want You 2, both 2010, capture dramatic
Scottish landscapes that seek to evoke the sublime in the tradition of Romanticist landscape
painters, but subvert the idealising tendency of that tradition by including many mundane and
contemporary aspects of the landscape – road signs, cattle grids and electric cables. Car Window
(Homage to Thomas Bewick), 2010, similarly includes the overlooked and banal in a
claustrophobic rural setting, but on closer inspection reveals a complex and obsessively textured
process of mark-making, inspired by 18th Century wood engraver Thomas Bewick and by Islamic
calligraphic manuscripts. As in River, 2010, Kings explores Bewick’s formal ideas, playing with
the traditional limits of the rectangular image.
Some works include text (Untitled, 2010) where emotions are etched into the landscape through
phrases that are left out of, rather than written into the surface, and thus defined by their absence.
Others create formal tension: although Kings’ scenes are rarely occupied, elements in the
composition - trees, boats, or posts - stand in for human figures, as in Anchorage 2, 2010-11,
where boats occupy the scene with the presence of actors, or the serene figures of Wellfleet Pines
2, 2010.
Tarka Kings was born in 1961. She lives and works in London. Her work is in private collections
in the UK and the USA.
Image: River, 2010. Pencil and gouache on gesso panel, 30 x 40 cm
For further information or images, please contact: Faggionato Fine Arts on 0207 409 7979 or info@faggionato.com
Faggionato Fine Art
49 Albemarle Street - London
Opening Hours: Monday to Friday, 10am – 5.30pm.