Gallery Text

This exhibition takes a look at three styles of Abstraction.

(I) Edwin Aitken's emotive, subjective response to the natural world. A woodland walk is the catalyst for an ultimately non-literal interpretation of the landscape. The build-up of an array of marks creates a complex surface and a pictorial space in constant flux.

(II) Graham Lister uses the activity of painting as a way of thinking about contemporary physical experiences. His work encompasses gradual abstraction processes, investigating visual codes and surface textures through repetitive mark-making and a delicious combination of gesture and careful filling in.

(III) Kate Whateley's work is both Painting and Sculpture, or neither Painting nor Sculpture. It is an intriguing ambivalence. She meticulously constructs works that only bear resemblance to something fabricated by machine, yet with just enough handmadeness to create a unique, human experience for the viewer. It is curated by Sean Williams.

Prosaic Projects Gallery, Bloc Studios, 198 Arundel Street, Sheffield S1 4RE

Exhibition dates: 1 - 31 May 2023

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This exhibition was conceived by Sean Williams, an established artist and curator I have worked with many times in the past. Three artists were each invited to exhibit one work within this exhibition – with the view to draw attention to the ways that abstraction in painting remains a powerful, multi-faceted and relevant term.

By isolating single works, in very close proximity to one another, Williams looked to showcase a complex snapshot of what abstract painting has the potential to ‘do’, not just ‘what it is’.

These 3 works were featured in a previous exhibition in Sheffield, in which there had been a much larger number of artists. This exhibition felt like a distillation of that exhibition.

Specifically, the abstract (A Different Sort of Stress) work takes cursive writing and looks to blend potential legibility with fragmented glimpses of colour – obscuring and obfuscating the text. Through doing this, an oscillation between that which a viewer feels should be able to be read, and an ensemble of clearly abstracted, aesthetic marks plays out. This work is part of ongoing visual research relating to surface materialities, textures and markmaking within contemporary painting.