The Figure

4th - 26th April

Greenberg states that "the legacy of Modernism lies in the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticise the discipline itself, not to subvert it, but to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence." Technique calls attention to itself, increasing the objectification of the image and freeing it from the stigma of history. Whether the source material is a snapshot, a magazine still, a news photograph, or the artist's own material, a paradoxical tension is created through the emotional immediacy of the artist's technique and the countering of it by a distancing from the source subject through the use of media imagery or ready-mades.

The works of the eight artists in this exhibition explore these ideas. Through the use of the human form as a point of departure, they are not only interested in the figure and its relationship to a specific situation or narrative, but utilise it freely to confront other issues such as identity, sexuality, disorientation and certainty. The figure can be distorted by the will of the artist, where virtuosity of technique, beauty, symbolism and surrealism fuse together to create new possibilities of contact. As Lucien Freud remarked," the longer you look at an object the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real". This observation could underpin the exhibition.