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20/9/2007

Two exhibitions

MK Gallery, Milton Keynes

Phoebe Unwin - A Short Walk from a Shout to a Whisper

This is the first major exhibition by the British painter Phoebe Unwin. Unwin’s paintings shift between figuration and abstraction, capturing chance observations of reality, constructs of memory and indirect references to particular places and events.

Throughout her practice, Phoebe Unwin works incessantly in an A3 drawing book, creating a personal register of images and marks. Individual pages are worked up simultaneously creating visual dialogues, some obvious, some obscure as Unwin teases and collages images, shapes and forms from the format of the page and materials at hand in pastel, pencil and acrylic.

The entire contents of each drawing book, as in The Grand and the Commonplace, 2006, are sometimes displayed collectively as an individual work. On the one hand Unwin’s practice appears highly conventional; the drawing book providing impressions for future paintings, often larger in scale and rendered in oil and acrylic. On the other, her approach seems more akin to a literary tradition of composition making or a musical fugue – fuelled with visual echoes and counterpoint.

Unwin’s paintings each have their own autonomy yet possess a clear genetic and familial link such that the entire breadth of her output has no specific hierarchical order. There are recurring motifs that suggest an autobiographical thread; sunglasses, modernist geometrical forms and portraits – one of the images depicts a person blushing in the dark, a glowing face with black impasto eyelids. Throughout her work the artist creates a counterpoint between explosive abstract paintings and a darker, often sinister psychological interior space.

This exhibition will be accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with a text by Max Henry.

Phebe Unwin is represented by Wilkinson Gallery, London http://www.wilkisongallery.com

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Alex Frost - Adults

British artist Alex Frost works in a variety of media. This exhibition will present a selection of recent sculptures, drawings and mosaic panels. These reflect Frost’s interest in the conflation of modern technology, the serial and the multiple with a distinctive hand-made aesthetic.

His work ranges from the miniature to the monumental, from intimate decoration to architectural intervention, and locates itself in many differing contexts; the space of the studio, the gallery, wastelands, parks, and cultural centres. Frost’s Adults are rock-like sculptures, malformed and enlarged versions of food packaging that are at once sophisticated and clumsy. The sculptures are informed by the well-intentioned community projects that he was involved with as a teenager in north London.

Format Wars is a single work divided into two parts that augments the Adults series. As a two part work it conveys a variety of oppositions such as the domestic versus the public, the digital versus the analogue, the intimate versus the exposed, the defined versus the unclear. Embedded within the ceramic-tiled surfaces are the symbols for the HD DVD and Blu-ray formats. Such collision between Frost’s reference to the stuff of domestic DIY with the promise and sophistication of digital advancement is both playful and poignant.

Frost’s use of mosaic bears a formal relationship with the digital or bitmap imagery that he employs for creating his ‘blind drawings’. In these, photographs are converted into bitmap prints and each pixel ‘punctured’ with a pin from the reverse allowing the application of metallic enamel paint to seep through to create a bejewelled surface.

Alex Frost: Adults is a collaboration with ArtSway. Alex Frost will be in residence at ArtSway, which is based in the New Forest in Hampshire, from 10 August - 12 October 2007, with an exhibition from 23 February - 6 April 2008. A publication will be available during Frost's ArtSway exhibition, published in collaboration with Milton Keynes Gallery, ArtSway and Sorcha Dallas.

Alex Frost is represented by Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow http://www.sorchadallas.com

Opening: 21 september 2007 5.30-8pm

Milton Keynes Gallery
900 Midsummer Boulevard, Milton Keynes
Free admission

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