calendario eventi  :: 

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29/6/2006

Beach

The Agency Gallery, London

Karin Hanssen and Janice McNab

The Agency is pleased to present Karin Hanssen and Janice McNab, two established European painters with recent works. Hanssen hails from Antwerp, her influences are within the school of painting which has become renowned worldwide for its renewed approach to realism in painting specific to that region. Hanssen was part of the Sharjah Biennale and the Yokohama Triennale last year. McNab comes from Scotland and currently lives in Amsterdam. Her work has been highlighted widely in the art press and was part of the Prague Biennale and the Essl collection in Vienna.

Both painters have a conceptual approach to the medium of painting and realism more specifically. Both utilise photographic sources as key to their practice yet subvert them to go beyond objective reality. Hanssen does so by taking images from magazines and other people’s memorabilia, including film and McNab takes research images with her camera of objects and scenes of everyday life and transforms them into experiential representations of reality. Both artists work with a presumed distrust vis-a-vis the camera’s objectivity, especially when referring to domestic or leisure scenes. The suspicion is based on a gendered viewpoint of disbelief in the automatic allocation of certain objects and social scenarios to women and family life.

The disbelief is expressed in the critique of the medium itself. Hanssen paints on a very small scale, her domain is portraiture in the widest sense, the depiction of ordinary people, families, wives, husbands and children going about daily life. The paintings are beautiful from afar, in their colour scheme in the reminiscence of Flemish master painting, yet ,she utilises a large amount of black in her palette, muting all colours to a greyish film heightened by the slightly unfocused image itself. The images appear dreamlike, however the dream is of a life so ordinary that whilst the scenario attracts it repels at the same time. McNab paints realistically both in silhouette and in palette but the scenarios she depicts are constructed or man-made environments, which belie their initial allure. Coming from a different painterly style her critique silently speaks of the false promise of commodity and of longing for another altogether more real reality. Both artists play on double-take, expertly merging their technical strength as painters with an uneasy relationship to traditional subject matters.

This approach is most visible in two paintings by the artists, which are both entitled Beach. Hanssen’s beach is a beautiful scene of two people caught unaware enjoying themselves by the seaside. Rather than a sunny paradise the beach is painted in muted colours, without resorting to obvious explanations such as the weather the beach is overhung and the light seems to be fading. This creates a sense of unease, with the scene appearing shortlived and passing. McNnab’s beach is equally disturbing, as it is actually based indoors in a garish leisure centre, alluring because of the dramatic spotlight thrown onto it and utterly disappointing because the sea is a clumsy mural produced for a cheap inland holiday resort.

Both artists represent environments which cannot be fixed in time, as the captured moment is of now and yet the environment it occurs in is either dated or has a spent quality about it. Both artist’s works are realist in recognizing and highlighting that most of us live second-hand lives as we pass through functional places in which repetitive events occur. However, since neither artist represents this reality from an objective point of view, both speak of the hope for an exit route and their own personal refusal to partake in this reality for too long. This produces a subtle tension in both oeuvres, despite their very different geographical origins.

The Agency Gallery
18 Charlotte Road - London

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