THE AESTHETICS OF ENCHANTMENT IN ABSTRACT ART

A group show of contemporary abstract art featuring Nina Dolan, Mark Wright, Rebecca Meanley, Lawrence Noga, Henry Ward, Gordon Dalton and Charlotte Winifred Guérard.

“You can make up your own history, but the point remains: the paintings here assert something, however quietly – that painting, whatever it’s of, is always first and foremost of the world we share.”  Ben Street
 

The Aesthetics of Enchantment In Abstract Art marks the start of a new season of exhibitions curated by Aleph Contemporary at the In & Out, one of London’s most prestigious private members clubs in the heart of St. James’s. The exhibition brings together seven contemporary artists, all of whom work in paint and whose works are connected through the exploration of abstract art. Each artist taking abstraction in a unique direction.

Nina Dolan’s work is distinguished by a poetic sense of geometry, movement, decoration, and colour. Gordon Dalton’s contemporary interiors and landscape paintings reveal traces of style and form inspired by the Nabis, Fauvism and twentieth century abstraction. Widely admired, British artist Rebecca Meanley’s paintings exhibit a remarkable orchestration of bold colour and gesture. Multi-media artist Laurence Noga creates striking geometric paintings and colourful, yet architectonic collages assembled from industrial materials and found objects. Henry Ward explores the structure of painting and the act of making. In works hewn from a process of layering pigment, laid out in rapid movement, Ward’s paintings come together as perfectly configured pieces created by blocks and roundels of colour and patterning. Mark Wright’s nocturnal, luminous paintings capture the beauty of sublime landscape. Using a cosmic alternation of light and dark, Wright creates mediated imagery based in part on photographs taken and collected. French artist Charlotte Winifred Guérard’s monumental abstractions offer a lyrical response to the natural world; aqueous expanses of pigment and pattern form oceanic cartographies of colour on paper and canvas.

In an extended text written to accompany the exhibition, Ben Street observes that space-making is central to the paintings of Mark Wright, Laurence Noga and Charlotte Guérard, while Rebecca Meanley’s and Nina Dolan’s works focus more on the process of applying paint to surface. Henry Ward and Gordon Dalton, Street says “play at the edges of description and by doing so embody the intransigence of painting as a medium, its ability to be many things at once.” In summing up the theme of this reflective exhibition on the nature of abstraction, Street says: “What all of these artists do is to position their paintings as points of contact between two kinds of experience, the maker’s and the viewer’s.” He continues: “The paintings here are unmistakeably physical and of the world of sight and touch. Their metaphysics, if it’s there at all, comes through an encounter with the world as experienced bodily.”
 

THE AESTHETICS OF ENCHANTMENT IN ABSTRACT ART

11 October 2022- 15 January 2023
Exhibition at the In & Out (Naval and Military Club) 4 St James's Square, St James's, London SW1Y 4JU.

Free to attend. Book here

View the exhibition online at alephcontemporary.com

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