Partou
dal 21/2/2002 al 23/3/2002
Segnalato da
21/2/2002
Partou
Art Space Gallery, London
Portrait of absence. New paintings with a digital installation and Prose. For this exhibition Partou has been working on a series of 'self-portraits' and 'interiors' inspired by her own immediate environment. In the 'interiors' it is the mundane and ordinary things that are the subject: a chair, props in the studio, cans of paint, brushes, or aspects of the rooms and spaces that she lives and works in.
Portrait of absence
New paintings with a digital installation and Prose
Partou
was born in Tehran in 1958 and came to England at the age
of eleven. She graduated from Warwick University with a BA in Art History
in 1980 and then trained as a painter at the Slade School of Art between
1986 and 1991. She moved to Newlyn in Cornwall in 1993 and during1998-2001
completed a practice-based PhD at Falmouth College of Art and Plymouth
University. This will be her second solo exhibition at Art Space Gallery.
For this exhibition Partou has been working on a series of 'self-portraits'
and 'interiors' inspired by her own immediate environment. In the 'interiors'
it is the mundane and ordinary things that are the subject: a chair,
props in the studio, cans of paint, brushes, or aspects of the rooms
and spaces that she lives and works in. Partou writes that,
In these images of an intimate space and place of work, the intrinsic
shape of things is delineated by light.' and indeed what distinguishes
these paintings is a very particular quality of light that floods into
the work and confers a mysteriousness on scenes and objects that would
otherwise be ordinary and uneventful. Just as the interiors are a record
of her environment, the self-portraits are a way of documenting herself
observed through a mirror, but extended to the domestic and differentiated
space of an individual history. Both the interiors and direct
paintings of myself, act as a catalogue of absences. These are portraits
of absence, and of emptiness, even when apparently representing a mirror/memory
of a body, of a space or of things.
Working from drawings, Partou's paintings are gradually brought together
into compositions that are constantly revised and perfected until they
achieve a unity and expressive vision of their own. These paintings
enact the dramas and experience of life: the daily experience of self
played out and scrutinised with a heightened and unblinking self-examination,
which suggest the urgency of discovery. They are paintings that might
belong to the traditional genres of the portrait and still life, but
they do not conform to academic expectations of what such paintings
should be.
Gallery Hours: 11am - 7pm Tue - Sat
Art Space Gallery
84 St Peter's Street
London N1 8JS
T : 020 7359 7002