calendario eventi  :: 

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19/11/2008

Two exhibitions

Gimpel Fils, London

Sista Pratesi
New Thought Unity

In Sista Pratesi's new body of work we are presented with a fictional society of women. Inspired by Aldous Huxley's novel 'Island', Pratesi has created her own community set in a timeless world. In his novel, Huxley invented an enlightened Utopian society and proposed that the key to solving the world's problems lies in changing the individual through mystical enlightenment. Pratesi's paintings portray her own imagined society, isolated from the known world. The female inhabitants have attained a form of enlightenment beyond anything achieved our world.

Calm and powerful women are depicted in various poses. The economical use of colour gives these women uniformity, although each is distinct, connected by the abstract thoughtscapes through which they achieve a unified consciousness. In this hidden world, conventional landscapes have been replaced by internal thoughtscapes. Significantly, Pratesi has chosen not to paint the eyes of her subjects, replacing them with dark almond shapes. Eyes, so often thought to be the window to the soul, the focus of interaction between people, are presented as dark voids. This is not to suggest that these women are empty, but rather their anonymity and our inability to read them puts them at a distance from us and prompts our own desire to get closer to them. These women are defined by their thoughts and their collective freedom to just be.

This is Sista Pratesi's second solo show at Gimpel Fils. She graduated from the Slade School of Art in 1994 and was awarded the Abbey Rome Fellowship in 2002. In 2007 she was included in the group show Mirror Mirror, at the Jerwood Space, London and has recently been selected for the John Moores 25 Contemporary Painting Prize, to be held at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 20 September 2008 to 4 January 2009. She lives and works in London.

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Giles Eldridge
Including doing nothing

Giles Eldridge is engaged with the idea of what constitutes Painting and Drawing. This concern is underpinned by a formal investigation into how the interpretation of art is constructed through an apparently consensual system of definable categories, styles and "-isms". Alongside this interest in the different stylistic forms that Painting and Drawing can take, is an additional curiosity in how that representational form influences and at times, dictates, our interpretation of the visual referent.

Selecting images from photographic sources, Eldridge's works of art are created using a variety of techniques and materials within the parameters of the practices of Painting and Drawing. Some works may be detailed graphite drawings whilst others are loose gouache or watercolour paintings. By working with these distinct materials in a variety of styles - photo-realist, abstract, impressionistic - he intentionally deploys a methodology of inconsistency in order to articulate differences within the structures of paintings and drawings.

In the same way that Eldridge employs a variety of styles, his subjects are also diverse; some works refer to famous or political subjects whilst others illustrate artefacts from non-western cultures, anonymous scenes or icons of art and architecture. The large-scale work, "Before Paris ?...I was at Nevers. Ne-vers" comprises over 50 individual paintings and drawings. Each individual piece is both a fragment in the complete work, whilst also distinct, with its own autonomy and aesthetic qualities. Creating a work based on singularity and multiplicity, Eldridge points to how interpreting an artwork is dependent upon experiencing the correlation between its component parts. The relationships between the images, along with their varied technical approach, produces an interpretive structure based on difference, where meaning is contingent.

Giles Eldridge was born in Sheffield in 1965 and received a degree in Fine Art from Sheffield City Polytechnic, 1993. Solo shows have included Non-Isotropic Drawings, Bloc Space, Sheffield 2006 and Atelier Gilles, Hat on Wall Gallery, London 2003. He has exhibited work in numerous group exhibitions, including Art Futures, Bloomberg Space, London 2008, The Golden Record, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, 2008 and Peer Esteem, Five Years Gallery, London, 2007.

Private view: Thursday 20 November, 6-8pm

Gimpel Fils
30 Davies Street London
Gallery opening hours: Mon - Fri 10am - 5.30pm, Sat 11am - 4pm
Free admission

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