This exhibition presents a diverse group of contemporary female landscape painters, each innovating within the genre: Amanda Ansell, Zoe Benbow, Hannah Brown, Rebecca Partridge, Polly Townsend, and Joanna Whittle. The artists examine the essential criteria, the recognisable truths of landscape painting: techniques, concepts, aesthetic sensibilities and inherent relationship with the medium. They look at how the real meets the imagined, plein air versus studio, and how the specific and the abstract can interact.
Curated by Polly Townsend, the exhibition also examines the relationship between experience and representation, such as restrictions on physical freedom and personal safety for women. All whilst contemplating the ongoing changes in the landscapes themselves. The grouping of female painters directly addresses the significant gender disparity in this area of painting for centuries and up to the modern day. The history of painted landscapes has been dominated by the male perspective and this exhibition, seen entirely through the female gaze, helps form a more collective story.
The artists have a variety of approaches to landscape painting: Joanna Whittle makes intimate paintings that touch on the sensuous handling of the romantics, whilst connecting with the history of miniatures. Her small almost hallucinogenic paintings are alongside the enveloping watery landscapes of Amanda Ansell whose work is similarly sensuous but handled abstractly via simple forms and wide overlays of colour. Hannah Brown and Polly Townsend are embedded in the figurative traditions of British landscape painting but have a different subject matter: Brown works with local parklands and familial rural settings, and Townsend works in remote, high-altitude locations. Rebecca Partridge makes work that, at first glance appears abstract, but is acutely observed objective painting of sky, while Zoe Benbow accumulates fragments of observations to bring together the real and the imagined.
Amanda says, “I left home on the Suffolk Essex border to pursue an arts education when I was nineteen. Having severed my roots in the land, I felt somewhat lost during my years away. When I returned ten years on, I longed for this landscape to hold me again, to re-discover its layers and for the sensate surroundings to reveal their beauty to me. I am attracted to the simple forms I observe in the landscape and down by the edges of the riverbank; the earthy organic colours and swirling patterns that reveal traces of the land formations beneath. Recollecting sensations and emotions in the presence of nature, I seek a synthesis between my impressions of a moment and my movement captured in liquid paint.”
Crossing Boundaries
APT Gallery
6, Creekside, Deptford
LONDON, SE8 4SA
Tel: 020 8694 8344
info@aptstudios.org
https://www.aptstudios.org/exhibitions2223_crossingboundaries
19 – 30 October 2022
Wed to Sun, 12-5 pm
Private View: Thursday 20 September 6 – 8 pm