"What is Any Thing? Paintings by Georgia Hayes"
2003-06-04 until 2003-06-29
Cafe Gallery Project
London, , UK United Kingdom

The first major London exhibition of the work of Georgia Hayes since her showing at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in March last year is to be held at Cafe Gallery Projects in June. Her work, described by director of the Arnolfini Caroline Collier, as "brave, crazy, generous" caught the eye of Barry Schwabsky who wrote in Art in America of Hayes's "strange visionary intensity."

Others have called her works "sumptuous.. a reconnection with the tradition of figurative painting,... taut with a dynamic and a sense of colour and excitement that is joyfully snatched from Modernist abstraction." (David Laing, Harriet Green Gallery)

"Hayes paintings manage a tremendous amount and tend to be of emphatic human scale...... A sense of openness crosses with densely painted but sparely populated images of person and/or place. (The images are) destabilised and left to float away from fixed references or association. Each painting retains, at the same time, an uncanny and often humorous specificity about certain elements within it; and with it the recognition of something familiar and understood." Sacha Craddock.

Speaking of her approach to painting, Hayes says; "I hope to uncover and make connections that come about through painting in a free way but include a focus on some subject. The subject is not exclusive to itself. Connections and references from other times and places add to and change it, so that the subject becomes as free and fluid as the paint. I want the paint and the painting to be energetic (have life), which may be partly due to the tension between marks, spaces and colours and partly due to the concentration of energy at the moment of painting. Things have to look like themselves in some unique way. Often it is the opposite to how I think they look and yet seems to be absolutely appropriate to the subject. It is as if the act of painting itself allows things to show themselves in another way. "

IMAGE:
Georgia Hayes
Bride's Head (2001)
oil on canvas
78 x 78cm

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