Coalescing around ideas of portraiture and abstraction, history and memory, revealing and concealing - the artists in this exhibition portray the figure in ways that are discrete and indirect, delicate and tender.
An exploration of the relationship between painting and photography, the exhibition brings together work by photographers Céline Bodin, Susan Derges, Anni Leppälä, Diana Matar, Jorma Puranen and Bettina von Zwehl - and painter, Gideon Rubin, whose work has a different yet equally vital relationship to photography, using purely photographic source material as the basis for his painted portraits.
Moving seamlessly between painting, photography, and sculpture, and incorporating high culture and mass media, each artist blurs the boundary between different forms of image-making.
Creating moments of intimacy, the images explore the relationship between the artist and their subject. Delicately composed and framed with poise, the exhibition will present the painterly gesture caught on film, and the photographic snapshot recreated in paint.
Less a document and more an evocation - for these artists photography moves beyond the factual/documentarian, and towards the atmospheric. There is a suggestion of something beyond the frame, just out of sight... Rather than fully ‘exposing’ the subject, the artist withholds and withdraws, provoking questions about what is known, unknown and, ultimately, unknowable.
A fragment of time, a moment glimpsed, these images are of the distant and the not-so-distant past, the subject is both here and elsewhere.
