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1/2/2011

Aleana Egan

The Drawing Room, London

The Drawing Room is delighted to announce Aleana Egan’s first solo exhibition in London. Egan will make a new body of work in response to the architectural space and the immediate environs of the Drawing Room.

Drawing forms the starting point of Egan’s work, with a sketchbook providing a repository for the noting down of ideas and experimentation with forms that are developed into autonomous drawings, collages, sculptures and films. Ideas are triggered through observations made during everyday life, but also by memories of childhood experiences and works of literature. Often inchoate, these are atmospheric and sensory triggers that lack narrative definition and carry through into her practice through a subtle and intuitive working process. For example, it was the aura of tightness, a certain tension, that reading Jean Rhy’s novel ‘Good Morning, Midnight’ left her with, and it was this quality that she sought to engender in a sculptural form Character, 2010, although quite different from the drawing that Egan made after reading this story, does retain some of its characteristics.

Her works evolve through a series of stages, with each successive layer gaining a density until the final form emerges, coherent and cogent, yet insistently resisting the stamp of the finite. Her practice is dominated by a meandering, sensuous line which carries through into the fluid way in which her films are made and suggests a condition of flux. When the line is filled to form a plane and to become a receptacle, it is still kept open, to collect snow or rain water, as in, for example, In Their Order of Appearance, 2010, made for the Sculpture Center in New York. Egan often works with very crude materials such as cardboard, plaster and concrete, and her sculptures are painted with carefully mixed, very matt colours. The rawness and openness of the sentiment or idea that triggered the work is embodied by these carefully manipulated materials. Egan does not wish to tell stories or make grand gestures but to find appropriate forms to engender psychological states and memories.

An artists’ book will be published by the Drawing Room to coincide with the exhibition.

Aleana Egan was born in Dublin in 1979 and lives between Berlin and Dublin. Recent solo exhibitions include Mole Vanvitelliana, Ancona (2010), Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin and Art Basel Statements (2009)and Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (2008). Recent group exhibitions include Sculpture Center, New York (2010), 5th Berlin Biennale, Berlin and Kunsthalle zu Kiel (2008).

Space for the man whose keys I rescued, Art Basel Statements June 2009 to take a job in the city. Cardboard, decofill, tape, paint, varnish, copper nails 60 x 29 x 10 cms / 23 5/8 x 11 3/8 x 3 7/8 ins. Images courtesy of The Artist; Mary Mary, Glasgow

In conversation with Dr Sarah Lowndes
Thursday 17 February 19:00
admision free but booking essential

Private View 02 February, 18.30-20.30

The Drawing Room
Tannery Arts
Brunswick Wharf 55 Laburnum Street London E2 8BD
the gallery is open Wednesday to Sunday 12.00-18.00, or by appointment.

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