Jane Bustin

CALLIGRAMS

Jane Bustin, Kevin Finklea, Matt Magee, Estelle Thompson

Image: Jane Bustin les derniers fleurs, 2010

24 June - 24 July 2010

Private View: Wednesday 23 June - 6.30pm-8.30pm

The Eagle Gallery - EMH Arts

159 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3AL

opening hours: Weds-Fri 11am-6pm and Sat 11am-4pm

0207 833 2674 www.emmahilleagle.com emmahilleagle@aol.com

see details at http://davidgryn.wordpress.com

Calligrams features four artists whose work explores contemporary paths of minimalist abstraction. The exhibition brings together UK-based painters Jane Bustin and Estelle Thompson with American artists Matt Magee and Kevin Finklea. Calligrams poses questions about the challenge involved in reinventing non-representational genres. The artists work within traditional parameters of colour, form and support, yet each in individual ways extends them.

Finklea’s recent paintings arise from memories of place and time and have moved off the two-dimensional picture plane into three-dimensional reliefs. The range and vocabulary of Finklea’s colour, whether the exclamatory blush of two contrasting pinks or the meditative quality of a light blue are focused and projected into space through these sculptural forms

Echoes of Suprematism and Colour Field abstraction are evident in the work of Kevin Finklea and Estelle Thompson, in the use of geometric forms and the manipulation of ranges of complex, high-keyed colours.

The intense colours and re-worked surfaces of Estelle Thompson’s oils on panel bring to mind a range of associations from past traditions in painting, from the shimmering light of Renaissance frescos to the distressed surface of Jasper Johns ‘Flag’. Thompson’s nuanced surfaces act in counterpoint to her plays with geometric form, in which a simple division of a rectangle can offer myriad visual possibilities.

Matt Magee’s more emblematic paintings employ simple pictograms such as punctuation marks or numbers, as a way of incorporating language into the work under his own abstract terms. Formally satisfying simply as shapes, these signs are also weighted with exclamatory meaning and are held within surfaces of painterly marks.

Jane Bustin’s investigations into the potential for the abstract image to allude to emotional states or metaphorical ideas are closest perhaps to traditions of the sublime in abstraction. Exploring sources in literature, her recent series of works are made in response to Mallarmé’s volume of poems ‘’Pour Anatole un tombeau’. Employing a range of materials and supports the work has moved into the territory of installation where related paintings and text are sited in three-dimensional arrangements.

Jane Bustin is represented by the Eagle Gallery. Her most recent solo exhibition Unseen – A collaboration, took place at the British Library, London.
Kevin Finklea’s recent solo exhibition Memories are Uncertain Friends was held at Margaret Thatcher Projects, New York.
Matt Magee’s forthcoming solo show takes place at the Knoedler Gallery, New York..
Estelle Thompson is represented by the Purdy Hicks Gallery, where she had a solo show in 2009.

PAST SHOWS ...

UNSEEN
A Collaboration
Jane Bustin, Tracy Chevalier, John Hull

12 January - 14 March 2009

The British Library, 96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB

Unseen is an exhibition of paintings and texts, which are the result of a two-year collaborative exchange between the British artist Jane Bustin, the writer Tracy Chevalier and theologian John Hull, author of Touching the Rock.

John Hull’s account of the onset of total blindness and its impact on his sensory perceptions and spiritual beliefs, prompted Jane Bustin to explore ways of making paintings that might involve an ‘unseeing’ of an original visual image. In 2006 she invited Tracy Chevalier to translate the effects of a series of minimal abstract paintings into words, as a means of making the works ‘visible’ to Hull. Chevalier’s texts acted as a conduit for Hull to respond to the original paintings. Completing the Chinese whisper, Bustin conceptualised Hull’s words as related ensembles of paintings, where the scale, colour, materiality and interval of each element were determined by Hull’s perceptions.The final visual images are in a sense, authored by someone who cannot see.

The exhibition includes the initial sequence of paintings: Touch-Shout, Stroke-Grief, Breath-Kiss, together with email exchanges between the collaborators. Chevalier’s texts are steeped in imagery that evoke the scents and textures of sensations and memories as a way of circumventing visual description – “The hiss of a radio tuned between stations…”. Hull’s responses are short and distilled, yet powerfully sensuous – “Kiss suspends breath / I hold breath to hold you…”.

Bustin’s final works, which employ various mediums of oil on wood, aluminium, silk and gesso have undergone subtle but perceptible changes. Arranged at irregular intervals on the wall (to echo the space between words on a page) they invite long and close contemplation. The works subvert traditional formal readings, since the related objects and the spaces between them must be read as a whole. The paintings have an extraordinary vocabulary of colour and texture, relying on the most minimal haze of pigment on the textured weave of a canvas, or a stain of oil bleeding from beneath a skin of overlaid paper. The painted objects and their after images, reflected at intervals as pools of colour along the walls, are meditations in the widest sense on ‘seeing’.

A limited edition bookwork will be published by EMH Arts / Eagle Gallery Publications for the exhibition.
For further details please contact the Eagle Gallery on 020 7833 2674 or email: emmahilleagle@aol.com

This exhibition is in association with The British Library

FIGURING LIGHT

COLOUR AND THE INTANGIBLE

Duncan Bullen, Jane Bustin, Rebecca Partridge, Richard Kenton Webb

13 November 2008 - 18 January 2009

Djanogly Art Gallery, Lakeside Arts Centre, University Park, Nottingham

Opening hours: Monday - Saturday 11am-5pm, Sunday (Bank and University Hols) 12 noon-4pm