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9/1/2008

The Clearing

Nettie Horn Gallery, London

NETTIE HORN is proud to present The Clearing, a group show consisting of works by Joe Biel, Rebecca Stevenson, Alex Ball and Stephanie Quayle. The exhibition is concerned with the artists’ use of the limitations between internal worlds and outward expressions. Exploring a sophisticated visual language, the works in the exhibition are scattered with art historical and literary references, merging classical elements with contemporary content echoing a strain of elusive narratives that run throughout the entire exhibition.

American artist Joe Biel presents us with bleak and refined drawings that he embellishes with obsessively specific objects and expressions, which offer a multitude of potential narratives and metaphors. It is these conflicting elements and his strong literary references that entice us into Biel’s world of self-consciously enigmatic characters, darkly humorous in their detachment from our seemingly comprehensive reality, all the while mirroring universal experiences and anxieties. Comedy, drama, tragedy and banality litter his meticulous renditions of a world charged with human situations.

The sculptures of British artist Rebecca Stevenson literally invite us inside our own flesh through a visceral sensuality and beauty. Her sophisticated work combines the classical and traditional concern with naturalism with grotesque and macabre interventions redolent of anatomical dissections. However, these areas of decay and brutality are beautifully decorated, reminding us of the over-ornamental decadence of the baroque. The decomposing hybrid creatures she has created are not hermetic entities but appear to us as if with their wound being laid bare, exposed literally to the bone through layer upon layer of delicate flesh, fungus, blood, aesthetically decaying before us and confronting us with death. A death which appears to be neither unknown nor fearful but which breaches conventional binary oppositions such as decay and generation or beauty and ugliness, and touches upon a sense of balance which is ultimately reassuring.

Heavily influenced by the short writings and diaries of Franz Kafka, Alex Ball’s intricate paintings evolve from a mixture of his own sketches, prose writings and grafted images from a personal archive of second hand books and manuals. Suggestive of parables and allegories, Ball’s paintings result in a disjointed and lingering amalgamation of repetitive images and characters that oppose their original context. Whilst maintaining a reference to the historical tradition of vanitas and panel painting, Ball encourages unrest through his haunting symbolic content and enduring image associations which are formed between objects and bodies but which are too unstable to be bound by definite readings. The physical and conceptual space occupied by his subjects and his literary preoccupations call the onlooker to read the paintings as they would a book.

Stephanie Quayle introduces the wild outdoors to contrived domesticity and civility in her crude and primeval sculptures. The focus is her fascination with primal animal instinct; she highlights the tensions and boundaries of our inner ‘animal-ness’ with the brutality and potency of the materials she employs. The immediacy and raw energy of clay and how Quayle employs drawing as a technique to create three-dimensional forms emphasize its abrasive appearance against the clean craftsmanship of the furniture. Directly confronting the irony of our ‘human-ness’, Quayle draws out the inner force, intrinsic to nature and ourselves and evokes a strong sense of history, which in this case is diffused with a note of wry and cynical humour.

Image: Joe Biel, Pistol, 2006, Graphite on paper, 30 x 22in

Private View: Thursday 10 January, 6-9 pm

Nettie Horn Gallery
25b Vyner Street, London
Free admission

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