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12

ANDREW GRAVES
STEPHEN HARWOOD

'Common Ground'

7 - 30 November

private view Thursday 6 November 6 - 9pm

At first the pairing of Andrew/Stephen seemed wilfully perverse – an abstract painter self-consciously in the tradition of the American Abstract Expressionists (though with a twist), and an entirely figurative painter of re-imagined landscape... self-consciously in the very English tradition of... But that's where the experiment in disassociation becomes an exercise in coincidence, as when two people find in mid conversation that their mothers both grew up in the same town. Both painters put their work through a distinctive refining process, their sources pared down and stripped of bombast.

With Graves the scale of the work strips Expressionism of its overweening need to 'express' and becomes more reflective, as though Ginsberg had taken heed of Emily Dickinson as indeed he did of Blake and simplified and refined his 'Howl' into a cogent touching ballad.

With Harwood's landscapes we both do and don't know what we are looking at. Familiar tamed landscapes of Southern England appear skewed, not quite themselves. Their source material: travel books (i.e. the Shell Guides), films (i.e. of Derek Jarman), and photographs (i.e. of Paul Nash) links them with eras lost through time and mortality.

Their handling, their own processes of refinement result in a matter-of-fact sublime, a numinous everyday.

Both artists live and work in London.


studio1.1
57a Redchurch St London E2 7DJ
tubes: Shoreditch High St/Liverpool St/Old St
bus: 8, 26, 35, 47, 48, 149, 344, 388
email: [email protected]
tel: 07952 986696
web: http://www.studio1-1.co.uk
open: Wednesday to Sunday 12-6 pm
or by appointment