Private and Public’s latest art exhibition is titled ‘Atlantis’ and features the work of Kirsty Garcia.
Channel Eye caught up with the Gallery Director, Chris Clifford, who told us more about the exhibition: “As I reached the top of eight flights of stairs on my first visit to Kirsty Garcia’s attic studio I breathlessly asked the artist about her family background.
“‘Spain’ came the answer and the moment we entered her immaculate white studio everything made perfect sense to me.
“It was a hot late summer’s afternoon as the sun poured through the roof lights. I was immediately immersed into a cobalt blue Mediterranean Sea and azure blue sky. As my eyes refocussed I began to imagine hot Spanish marble flagstones as I conjured images, sounds and smells of coastal cities such as Barcelona, Tarragona and Valencia.
“Kirsty’s abstract paintings are, of course, very beautiful but they also have the capacity to transport us to another place. Like the lost underwater city of Atlantis we can imagine being there but tantalisingly have yet to experience it.
“Coming from the long tradition of ‘process painting’ gravity is the defining feature of Kirsty’s paintings. Luscious, thick pools of paint create unctuous surfaces that we want to dive into. The richness of her surfaces may also look effortless but she has spent many years exploring the way paint, colour and canvas interact to provide us with timeless and elegant abstractions.
“The term ‘process painting’ refers to when the process of its making is not hidden but remains a prominent aspect of the completed work, so that a part or even the whole of its subject is the making of the work itself. ‘Process painting’ became a widespread preoccupation of artists in the late 1960s and the 1970s, but like so much else can be tracked back to the abstract expressionist paintings of Jackson Pollock. In these the successive layers of dripped and poured paint can be identified and the actions of the artist in making the work can be, to some extent, reconstructed. The later colour field paintings of Morris Louis clearly reveal his process of pouring the paint onto the canvas.
“In process painting there is also an emphasis on the results on particular materials of carrying out the process determined by the artist. In Louis again, the forms are the result of the interaction of artist’s movements, the type and viscosity of the paint, and the type and absorbency of the canvas.
“Richard Serra made work by throwing molten lead into the corners of a room. Robert Morris made long cuts into lengths of felt and then hung them on a nail or placed them on the floor, allowing them to take on whatever configurations were dictated by the interaction of the innate properties of the felt, the artist’s action and gravity.
“The contemporary British painter Ian Davenport, who has shown with the gallery in the past, makes paintings by establishing a set process for the work and then carrying it through until the canvas is filled with multi-coloured stripes of vertical paint which have been dripped down the surface of the canvas.
“The outcome of Kirsty Garcia’s paintings provide us with a joyous celebration of colour and the ability to marvel at their superlative technical skill and at the height of summer, when we all like to spend as much time as possible either on or in the sea, this exhibition is perfectly timed to provide visitors to the gallery with a truly immersive experience.”
The exhibition is available online from Tuesday 20th July.
The (physical) exhibition at Private and Public’s Jersey gallery runs daily (except Sundays) from 23rd July until 20th August.
