What's On In Mayfair During The Next 7 Days
'Wild Wild Waves' by Zoe Benbow
Hay Hill Gallery - Monday 6th February 2012 to Saturday 3rd March 2012
Hay Hill Gallery is pleased to announce a new exhibition by British artist Zoe Benbow. The show focuses on a series of paintings developed from drawings of the coastal landscape of County Mayo Ireland, made during a residency in Spring 2011. This visually compelling series of work plays with colour and process to engage the audience with an unfamiliar space. The large-scale oils communicate a sense of awe whilst celebrating an enjoyment of the visual world.
Zoe Benbow has worked extensively with landscapes, mapping and exploring her surroundings and questioning how we see the world and our relationship to it. Her latest series of paintings take reference from the European landscape genre. Their aim is to subvert our traditional perspective by placing this genre in the context of our current environmental climate. Benbow encourages the observer to examine the established perceptions of our place in the world, shifting and unravelling our position as a detached observer. Benbow's work adheres to the notion that human activities do not only affect the surrounding landscape but are part of it. This echoes the words of Marcus Chown who observes that we are made of the same stuff as the stars'. Zoe Benbow's paintings aim to challenge our sense of separateness from our surrounding environment.
'Moon Mages' by Sveta Yavorsky
Hay Hill Gallery - Monday 6th February 2012 to Saturday 3rd March 2012
Hay Hill Gallery is pleased to introduce a new exhibition by Russian artist Sveta Yavorsky. Inspired by and dedicated to the twelve moons of the solar system, the paintings in Yavorsky's collection are named after mythological heroes and literary figures as in the Western classical tradition.
A collection of literary eponyms, the idea of an allegorical connection between the name and the painting is merely suggestive. As Galileo Galilei once wrote, Names and attributes must be accommodated to the essence of things, and not the essence to the names, since things come first and names afterwards.' Yavorsky's latest paintings encourage us to reassess our premeditated assumptions that there is a connection between the name of the subject and the subject itself. In the case of 'Ganymede', in Greek mythology the Trojan prince of the same name was abducted by a bird, but as with the Galilean moon, any connections between the name and the subject are purely coincidental. All conjecture regarding the inner meaning of the painting is in the eye of the beholder.
Sveta Yavorsky is a figurative artist who works in the contemporary British trend. Her work rejects academic figurative representation and embraces the semi-abstract method of composition that Malevich termed the additional element' of painting. Yavorsky scatters particles of local colour with well-defined contours to form purely abstract clusters of elements. These bursts of colour collect into patterned layers and are combined until their superposition is balanced on entirely abstract terms. The human tendency to seek patterns in random data and find figurative fulfilment is subtly emphasised by the artist. However, Yavorsky diverts this process as her paintings reach a closure before the figurative is able to become literal. Yavorsky offers us abstract patterns of colour that merely resemble a spectral figure and so her paintings remain vibrant in a way only found in an abstract composition. She combines and contrasts the spectral allegorical figures with images of animals blended into the background by their realistically rendered camouflage. Through this process Yavorsky achieves a collection of paintings that are a complex and contemporary mixture of the figurative and the abstract.
'Evolution' by Stanislav Plutenko
Hay Hill Gallery - Monday 6th February 2012 to Saturday 3rd March 2012
Hay Hill Gallery is pleased to welcome a new exhibition by the Russian artist Stanislav Plutenko. Represented by Hay Hill Gallery since 2002 and exhibited annually until 2010, Plutenko's latest exhibition is entitled Evolution' and as the name would suggest, reflects his personal evolution as an artist.
The majority of the collection centers on paintings from Plutenko's early career in the 1990's. Yet the inclusion of a selection of his recent works, which date from 2009 to 2010, enables Plutenko to map his personal progression as an artist. While Plutenko's work may appear to emerge from a mix of the surreal and the real, while reflecting old West Indian paintings along with the work of artists such as Salvador Dali, his overriding aim is to take the unusual and to make it more so.
Stanislav Plutenko produces vigorous, illustrative works that play on colour contrasts. His original method of painting employs a mixed palette of oil, tempera, acrylic, watercolour, airbrushing and glazing. Plutenko injects his paintings with a sense of sarcasm that is based on reality. While often presented through elements of the grotesque, each painting holds a symbolical underlying theme. Built around a variety of genres the effect of Plutenko's painting is to reflect representations of the ironic, the sarcastic and the bizarre. A variety of feelings are stimulated in the spectator as each painting is imbued with a small history of life that is replayed through a variety of genre scenes.
Stanislav Plutenko was born in Moscow in 1961. He studied at the Moscow University of National Economy, while taking lessons in painting from private masters. Plutenko created his first works in 1984 and from 1985 to 1990 worked in commercial advertising. During this time he continued to participate in exhibitions, working with Arbat 48', Artbat 34' and Mars' galleries in 1988. In 1991 he joined UNESCO's guild of graphic artists and was rewarded with the Grand Prix of the Golden Brush' exhibition in 1997.
In 2007 Plutenko received a rank at the International Academy of Creative Endeavors. The following year he was awarded with an order of Peter The Great' for his work towards the development of Russian Culture and Arts. In 2009 Plutenko received a Gold Medal named after N. Sats for his outstanding creative achievements in art development.' Plutenko's work has been exhibited internationally in Stockholm, Helsinki, USA, Germany and London along with his native Moscow.