Whittle's landscapes are sombre and
barren, being inhabited by leafless trees and stark rock
formations. The raw, potentially desolate nature of the
landscape is emphasized, but is punctuated by the evidence of
man and his pursuit to overpower nature, as illustrated by
traffic cones echoing tree stumps, a distant crane corresponding
to a naked tree, or the sterile ground lying partly paved.
Hannah Wooll paints strange hybrid creatures on a large scale;
her characters are displaying themselves, wanting to be looked
at. Striking poses inspired by Spanish masters such as Goya and
Velasquez, these figures are temptresses derived from Wooll's
own doll sized models. There is something desperate, however,
about these poor creatures that are forlorn and unaware of their
physical distortions. Their beautiful faces stare wantonly from
beneath outsized bows, attached to malformed, dysfunctional
bodies.
Vicky Wright pursues the sentiment of the Old Master in her
bizarre hybridised paintings. By responding to an Albert Cuyp
landscape or a Gainsborough sky, Wright subtly interweaves these
influences with her improvised fantastical forms. Wright's
forlorn creatures represent a personal mythology that is
strangely poignant and deeply seductive. |
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