Second Glances
Michael Davies, Nick Fox, Stephen Palmer, Narbi Price, Flora Whiteley
23 July – 30 August 2016
Narbi Price, Untitled Flowers Painting III, 2015, acrylic on canvas, 45x60cm
Michael Davies, Nick Fox, Stephen Palmer, Narbi Price, and Flora Whiteley are showing in ‘Second Glances’, Michaela Helfrich Gallery, Berlin, Germany. Each approach the figurative in art with a unique vision. What they share is a fascination with popular culture; with taking the plethora of imagery and narratives produced by the mass media – often starting with source material that is either printed or photographic – and through the processes of painting and drawing discovering a way of exploring deeply personal concerns, thus creating a sense of purpose and identity from the everyday and things that are often considered ephemeral or are easily ignored. Often it takes a second reading – or glance – to more fully begin to understand the artists’ intentions.
Michael Davies’ paintings and drawings are wry meditations on desire and mortality, their sources ranging from the artist’s own and family snapshots to anonymous, found images. His depictions of people engaged in seemingly inconsequential activity, mundane street scenes and institutional and domestic interiors on closer inspection reveal a search for the transcendent; every object, situation and denizen becoming an ominous herald of the unknown.
Nick Fox transforms the found taboo image and context into one of intimacy and emotive experience; creating tantalising idylls and elusive narratives of an Eden after the fall where innocence has been banished. In his series of delicately observed figurative pencil drawings, he transforms found images from pornography into ones of intimate and emotive experience in which languorous male figures emerge from the surface of the paper.
Stephen Palmer transcribes the ephemera of everyday life – from second-hand records to newspaper clippings (often obituaries or reports of a noted individual’s death) – into paint and pencil with exquisite precision. His coolly analytical approach belies a longing to create an order from the chaos of the mundane, as well as a wistful nostalgia for the simpler pleasures of his youth. This process of transcription – reproducing faithfully every nuance, every discolouration, crease or tear in the original – confers a sense of importance, value and permanence to objects and events that would otherwise be seen as the refuse of our disposable culture.
Narbi Price is interested in perceived histories of locations and how painting can question the understanding of architectural and pictorial space. He challenges the conventions of photographically derived painting in terms of paint application and composition, and in blurring the line between the figurative and the abstract. His paintings are derived from photographs taken on trips to places that have witnessed a range of events, whether from significant moments in music, film and TV, or from whimsical acts through to brutal murders and tragic deaths, all of which have spawned folklore.
Flora Whiteley’s oil paintings, watercolours and drawings explore how objects in space create a form of open ‘abstract’ dialogue with each other and the audience. She creates filmic and stage-like spaces from layers of source material; combining personal artefacts with found images: holiday snaps, film stills, newspaper cuttings, and art history books, to create enigmatic, suggestive scenes. Using a collage aesthetic, Whiteley creates ‘quiet moments between the action’, where empty rooms and figures in ambiguous activity are slowed to the moment before standstill.
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