Shaping the Void
Fiona Grady | Linda Hemmersbach | Hannah Luxton
Exhibition Private View: Friday 9th September, 7-9pm
Exhibition continues: 10th – 24th September
Open Saturdays 11am-4pm or by appointment
This exhibition presents three young painters united by their belief in painting’s power to transcend the physical world by activating imagination. The artists share a fascination with our ideas of the void, and an affinity with Eastern philosophy and spirituality, which perceives this nothingness as full of energy and light. In their romantic yearning for a sense of intimacy, Hannah, Fiona and Linda are attentive to subtle changes in colour, tone, opacity, and to the negative spaces in between, as they look to capture the intangible and reveal the invisible.
Fiona Grady presents the passing of time through a visual rhythm created by the movement of light captured in paint. Transforming spaces, her wall drawings concentrate the mind on the visual elements at play, and provoke a heightened awareness of the self as a body in a space. Linda Hemmersbach considers qualities of silence, mystery and uncertainty. Working from memory, she hopes to unearth something unseen and foreign during the painting process, thereby discovering transitions from conscious to subconscious. In her meticulously composed minimalist paintings, Hannah Luxton combines motifs derived from the natural world with subtle variations in colours and surface textures to produce works with an emotive core that is at once elemental, yet fragile and elusive.
Each artist invokes a visual language that is less defined within the descriptive, recognisable forms of everyday life – instead presenting a hidden view. Minimal forms and gestures speak of an essence in their search for a purer state. The works ask questions rather than giving answers; call for intuition rather than logic; and open a space for imagination to explore and reflect.
Bankley Gallery, Bankley St, Manchester M19 3PP