Nina Gehl
dal 24/1/2007 al 24/2/2007
Segnalato da
24/1/2007
Nina Gehl
Trolley Gallery, London
Her new works continue to explore themes in her painting of recent years. Gehl subverts the literal colours and hues of a scene to produce evocative and visceral images, which hint at a profound sense of the uncanny, through what at first glance is depicting the banal and unthreatening.
Elswhere
Trolley Gallery is proud to announce the second UK solo show of American
artist Nina Gehl. These new works continue to explore themes in her painting
of recent years. Landscapes seemingly devoid of physical human presence, at
the same time resonate with a sense of the departed spirit of human touch.
Working from old postcards and photographs she has taken, she subverts the
literal colours and hues of a scene to produce evocative and visceral
images, which hint at a profound sense of the uncanny, through what at first
glance is depicting the banal and unthreatening.
Working with a reduced and sombre palette, incorporating ochres, umbers,
blues and greys, she translates landscapes from glorious technicolour, until
they reach a suspended state of melancholy and enigma. For these paintings
in particular she has begun with the use of a flesh ochre ground,
traditionally used to bring warmth to skintones when working in oil, and
then worked in layer upon layer of paint thinned with turpentine to build up
the final colours, sporadically leaving flashes of this red raw ground.
Physically this technique evokes the building up and bringing together of
memory and reflection in the mind, as layers and connotations of the
conscious thought disperse to give way to the unconscious states of
familiarity and recognition. The result is an uncertainty in how to perceive
or comprehend. Cable cars hang suspended in a mountain valley, a
fairground’s summer evening remains deserted of customers. There is a
dislocation of the senses, almost disorientating, one wants to hear
movement, the sounds of a crowd, the lap of waves on the shore of a lake,
but there exists only a mute stillness, a faintly reverberating silence.
What adds to this eerie departure of life is that figures Gehl painted
initially, were then painted over and scrubbed away, leaving their ghostly
shadows hovering almost imperceivably. Similar to the loneliness felt in
Edward Hopper’s sparsely populated diners and gas stations, where lost souls
congregated in shared silence, Gehl has actively dispensed with any figures
that may have inhabited the locations, as if vaporised on the spot whilst
going about their daily life, blissfully unaware of their fate.
This sense of the unsettling from the seemingly everyday also echoes the
painting of Luc Tuymans, in the horror of the banal, the bleached and faded
memories of the darkest side of the human psyche smothered by the
connotation of the comforting. Gehl too lures us into her scenes with a
false sense of the secure, where there is always something more unsettling
in a subversion of the mundane.
Nina Gehl graduated from Byam Shaw School of Art in 2005 after studying
painting at Buffalo State College in New York. She has been part of numerous
group shows both in the UK, as well as in the USA and Hungary, where she
held a residency in 2001. She lives and works in London.
Press view 2-5pm Thursday 25th January
Trolley Gallery
73a Redchurch Street - London
UnDo.Net è un dispositivo di creazione di valore immateriale; pensato come "ecosistema" della cultura contemporanea, come modello partecipativo che sviluppi la condivisione di ricerche, risorse e conoscenze, la collaborazione e lo scambio.
In questi 20 anni UnDo.Net ha perseguito il suo scopo: inventare un nuovo spazio, che prima non esisteva, di sperimentazione e di ricerca, di confronto e di dialogo.
Anche in futuro UnDo.Net rimarra' consultabile e a disposizione di tutti gratuitamente.