Finding Paradise

This Autumn, Lacey Contemporary Gallery is proud to welcome the new Art Season with an exciting new exhibition - Finding Paradise - featuring three contemporary female artists, Gemma Billington, Orlanda Broom and Ylva Kunze, painting lush landscapes, forgotten pasts, and the ever-changing patterns of nature.

Gemma Billington born in Killorglin, Co. Kerry, is stylistically influenced by the works of Turner, Jack B. Yeats, and Matisse, though she admits that her primary influence is the ever-changing patterns of nature, and the timelessness of this subject. In her Eternity series exhibited for Finding Paradise, Gemma is exploring the eternity of nature through the subject of the flower. She steers away from traditional techniques, using vibrant colours and raw brushstrokes, applying her paint, almost like a dance, to the canvas. This energy is conveyed in the textured, abstract paintings, saturated with reds and exhibited in Finding Paradise.

British painter Orlanda Broom paints lush and colourful landscapes that represent a fantastical, re-imagined place. She portrays a hyper intense and in some sense a rose-tinted view of the natural world, a place and time untouched by man. The paintings created for Finding Paradise are made with layers of resin that builds up a smooth glass-like surface. She has then used oils in the final stages of the work to create the interesting contrast of areas of high gloss and matt paint that breaks up the surface. Light plays an important role within the work and in it's setting; the use of iridescent pigments and glazes means the work changes as you move around it and the subtleties of the painting expose themselves over time and after the initial assault of colour.

Ylva Kunze is a Swedish born artist, now living and working in London. The paintings featured in Finding Paradise are based on the woods in SmÃ¥land, Sweden, where the artist spent most of her time during the Summer and Winter. Ylva is fascinated by the magic and the beauty of the raw and untouched forest, and the reflection in the many lakes. She explores the tension between the opposites - positive and negative, dark and light, stillness and speed, artificial and natural, and in the painting process, chance and control