This is a show that brings together four artists that depict people. Each artist explores an aspect of the language of portraiture and offers a glimpse of potent and subversive notions that linger around the edges of propriety and convention. Two of the artists depict ambiguous, fictional subjects using paint. The other two require their real sitters to be complicit, agreeing to be manipulated or modified
for the camera.

Edward Wright paints groups of people (usually male) choosing to slightly overcook the facial expressions and hand gestures. Wright uses a restricted tonal range and removes any clue to the nature of the gathering or event. This deliberate limiting of signs causes the viewer to speculate on the context from which the men have been cropped - the expressions and gestures become unstable, forced, ecstatic or strained.

Ian Law paints and draws fictional characters taken directly from stories he writes. By painting them Ian says he wants to "help a small group of people who live nowhere" by giving them a presence. The resulting raw, barely complete images are a melancholy attempt to rescue these souls from the limbo of his imagination, inviting the viewer to help complete his creations in their mind’s eye.

Stefanie Kirlew adopts the aesthetics of the high street photographer in order to depict her own family with cuts and bruises as if they have each been the victim of an assault or involved in a big family brawl. The effect is disturbing and comic, triggering thoughts of domestic abuse or unseemly behaviour that doesn’t normally get recorded at this
kind of sitting.

Toru Nagahama enlists his sister, her clothes and everyday objects found around their home to record a series of highly playful human sculptures. The resultant images are absurd and uncanny documents of a domestic world born out of boredom, visual invention and the complicity of siblings.

TEXT: Martyn Simpson

Curators
Joe Madeira
Martyn Simpson

Artists
Stefanie Kirlew
Ian Law
Toru Nagahama
Edward Wright

Private View
Thursday 18 January 2007
6.00 - 9.00pm

Opening times:
Monday to Saturday
9.30am-5.30pm
Closed on Sunday
or by appointment

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call +44(0)20 8871 2272
or email The Gallery