The exhibition, Hard Bodies: Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, at Arndean Gallery is curated by James Fitzpatrick, Director of Corpus Fine Art. Corpus Fine Art specialises in contemporary representations of the human form. The artists showing are: John Afflick, Alex Davies, Chloe Early, Conor Harrington, Susan Hippe, Mariusz Kaldowski, Nicholas Middleton, Saqib Sheikh. More than 80 paintings, drawings and sculptures will be on show, many for the first time.
The show is entitled Hard Bodies as it includes work which is:
* Hard to create
* Portrays Hard men and Hardened women
* Makes you Hard
Individually, the images are provocative, sexy, thoughtful and beautiful. Overall, the exhibition contains a wide variety of styles (from traditional to street art), subjects (from angels to table dancers) and media (from oils to pencil sharpenings). But all show the Human Body in all its qualified glory.
The artists showing are:
John Afflick who paints realistic representational pictures using traditional techniques, which echo the work of old masters but with modern subjects. Recurrent themes in his work include angels and soldiers - often allegorical images echoing the fall and redemption.
Alex Davies is a sculptor who developed his own technique for working in steel - carving shapes with a flame cutting torch, then sanding and polishing parts to reveal a form. He also casts in bronze and steel on a small and monumental scale.
Chloe Early is a painter whose work examines the female presence in the urban landscape and the relationship between the individual and her environment. Her work explores ideas of scale, position and significance of the figure within the anonymous city.
Conor Harrington began as a graffiti artist in Cork. He has produced a series of archetypal portraits of a young male whose image has been reproduced on walls around the world. Masculine, pensive and strong, these portraits are created using oils and contemporary spray paint.
Susan Hippe produces sexy, colour-filled images primarily concerned with movement. Her work often combines drawing with mixed media/collage, incorporating more unusual media - either as support or collage material - such as cosmetic pads and coffee filters. Susan has been a Premiere Portfolio Artist at absolutearts.com since 2002. View moer of her work at: http://www.absolutearts.com/portfolios/s/susanhippe/
Mariusz Kaldowksi uses a variety of media to juxtapose vividly-expressed faces and figures with words and symbols. These faces confront the viewer, offering us a personality to examine but also a question about what our own face says unintentionally to those around us.
Nicholas Middleton produces photo-realistic images in oils, often focusing on people in everyday settings. In his work there is an interplay of surface and depth, with different scales and modes of representation - from the graphic-influenced to the purely photographic. Recent work includes photographic transparencies in lightboxes - allowing comparison between the photographic and the photograph.
Saqib Sheikh has produced a range of work drawing on the iconic imagery or Leonardo da Vinci. Large-scale drawings and monochrome paintings on paper interpret Leonardo's archetypes from a modern, graphic perspective.
IMAGE
Susan Hippe
Body Fluid
2004
Mixed Media
42 x 54 cm
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