London Exhibition/ Art
all media obtained @lanesboroughweb
We had the pleasure to attend the opening season of the The Lanesborough Art Programme.
The art display within the hotel’s glorious Regency dining room, is a six-monthly changing exhibition curated by Art Acumen. The latest exhibition, unveiled in February 2023, is composed around the theme ‘Landscapes’ and showcases modern art in a variety of mediums by a group of exciting British-based artists.
Art Acumen is a leading specialist art consultancy with twenty years’ experience curating & commissioning art collections. Catherine Thomas, Managing Director says, “We are passionate about curating art and delivering engaging creative programmes that bring people together to connect, share, socialise and collaborate”.
About the Artists
Anna Masters is a multi-disciplinary artist, whose practice includes mixed-media, installation, and participatory public art. Her works examine the transformational qualities of time and context on value and symbolism. In her mixed-media and installation art, Masters employs a range of organic and found materials, including petals, butterflies, clock parts, optical lenses, banknotes and costume jewellery.
The materials allude to personal histories and are often loaded with cultural symbolism. The progression of time, however, strips these materials of their value and meaning: the flowers die; jewellery breaks, and stops being worn; banknotes move out of circulation; the clocks stop ticking.
Barbara Howey lives and works in Norwich. Her paintings invite the viewer to experience a close-up view of fungal, plant and animal life. The paintings are part of an ongoing series focusing on more than human life found on walks, gathered from a variety of sources in East Anglia, from suburban green spaces to local woodlands and wetlands that are threatened with “development”.
The work is made wet into wet in one sitting revealing the process of making through the stains, drips and marks that describe the forms. The use of heightened colour and gestural marks references the painterly language of expressionism, which explore a subjective experience of the matter.
Bob Aldous captures abstract imagery in his paintings, often depicting an “atmospheric space” which relates to the movement, transparency, and reflections in water. Bob takes inspiration from nature, capturing expansive spaces, such as seascapes and landscapes in Cornwall and Tuscany.
After creating sketches en plein air, he returns to the studio. Here he draws on his memory of the experience to capture an immediate and fresh depiction of the atmosphere, colours and movements that inspired him. Throughout his work there is a combination of energy and repose, small meditations of our relationship with our environment.
Neil Canning is one of the most successful artists working in Britain today. Although considered very much part of the landscape tradition, it is abstraction that allows him to convey a much more personal response to the surrounding world.
His powerful, dramatic paintings aim to capture the sensation of being outdoors. They often give an impression of moving through the landscape, using multiple viewpoints, and changing light. Neil has exhibited widely, and his work appears in many major public and private collections worldwide.
Nick Archer’s landscape paintings focus on our relationship with the natural world and its place in our imagination. The paintings are at first glance made from beautiful passages of rich colour, which have been flooded onto the canvas, exposing interior landscapes that echo hollow fear and inner amazement, an imaginary place where a seemingly enchanted landscape lifts off the canvas and into the mind’s eye.
The themes he is interested in are also reflected in the process of how the paintings are made: Layer upon layer of coloured oil paint and leaves of gold foil build a rich surface which reveals the passage of time like the layers of a rock formation.
Paul Treasure is a British painter known for his expressive oil paintings reflecting the natural world. Characterised by movement, texture and gestural brushwork, Treasure’s paintings capture the underlying emotion of a place. Inspiration comes at every turn, from the scenic shores of the Cornish coast to a journey through the backwaters of Kerala.
Each of his paintings offers a tangible sense of depth. Whether reflecting chaos or calm, Treasure’s paintings are unified by their ability to portray the essence of nature.
Steven Maciver’s work has always been influenced by his surroundings. In recent years, Steven has become an avid runner and spends hours at a time on the trails and bridleways of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire which affords him time to observe the nature around him at close hand. Drawing and line are used in a reductive method as paint is removed from the surface to create the image. In this series of work the canvas is covered in gold, silver or copper leaf and semi translucent layers of paint are added.
Using various methods, this paint is then removed to create the subject matter, releasing the reflective properties of the surface underneath. The resulting image is designed to move and change with light, as in nature.
Serena Curmi’s work is caught between the past and present, marked and mottled with memories and histories. Brought up on a sailboat, she spent her childhood viewing the world from afar, schooled across continents and making multiple homes in the Caribbean, the Isle of Man, Malta, Spain and America. Her work has been shown in the Discerning Eye and at the Royal West of England Academy (RWA) and her recent series the Bedlam Case Studies, was a finalist in the 2018 Threadneedle Prize.
Curmi is currently working on a collection of imagined landscapes, focusing on the sublimity of mountaintops and places of exploration. She lives and works in Bristol, based at Jamaica Street Artists Studios.
Rebecca Gouldson is influenced by both urban and the natural landscapes, and is passionate about image making in metal, combining, and pushing the boundaries of techniques from a variety of creative traditions. Images are captured using acid etching and chemical patination, creating contrasting eroded and polished surfaces. Her metal wall pieces are in private and public collections, and she has worked on bespoke commission for companies such as Tiffany & Co in New York.
She exhibits worldwide, including: London Art Fair, ‘Collect’ at the Saatchi Gallery,‘SOFA; Sculptural Objects & Functional Art’, in Chicago, Santa Fe and New York, Art Palm Beach.
Zoe Benbow compares the practice of making paintings to walking, entering a space where we never quite know what is going to happen. It is the beginning of a journey where the outcome is never certain, and ideas and thoughts develop as they go. A finished painting is the sum of Zoe’s micro ideas and decisions, yet at its completion it exists in the world for the enjoyment of others. Her two paintings ‘Easedale Trees’ and ‘The Lake’ have been developed from research drawings and photographs made in Grasmere in the Lake District, during a project on Dorothy Wordsworth.
By revisiting the same motifs and images over a long period time and making these large-scale oil paintings in her London Studio, Zoe intended to evoke the landscape as remembered in fleeting moments. Zoe’s paintings are less about a representation of a specific place but aim towards a little reverie and magic with the intention of communicating a poetic reimagining of the woodland.
All exhibited works are available to purchase, whilst bespoke commissions can also be arranged if a particular sized piece is desired.
For more information reach https://linktr.ee/artacumen