TRUE COLOURS
JUNE 6 – SEPTEMBER 9TH 2018
Newport Street Gallery 1, 9 Newport St, London SE11 6AJ
Newport Street Gallery is pleased to present ‘True Colours’ an exhibition of paintings by three artists: Helen Beard (b. 1971, Birmingham), Sadie Laska (b.1974, West Virginia) and Boo Saville (b.1980, Norwich). Opening on 6 June 2018, ‘True Colours’ brings together three emerging artists that, despite using paint in very different ways, all share an interest in exploring the possibilities of colour. Featuring over XX works, the show is the largest exhibition to date for each artist.
Helen Beard uses a vivid rainbow palette to create interlocking arrangements of bright primary colour, which combine to describe explicit sexual encounters in flat detail. Working from found images, Beard’s work explores themes relating to gender, sexual psychology and eroticism.Situated part way between abstraction and representation, her figures are reduced to concisely defined fields of shiny colour, on which small brush marks remain just visible. Including a number of new works, one of which is a monumental diptych – (title?) each canvas measuring 10 x 9 feet – the exhibition spans eight years of Beard’s practice.
New York-based artist Sadie Laska creates dreamlike compositions using paint and collage. Evoking the rebellious post-Pop aesthetic of New York, Laska often incorporates recycled waste materials and found objects into her paintings, sometimes reworking parts of earlier canvases entirely. InUntitled (Pepsi shape), 2017, the canvas is carved up into contrasting areas, which are roughly painted with acrylic. The resulting amorphous shape evokes the distinctive colours of a can of Pepsi. (Previously?) a member of the underground drum-based band I.U.D., Laska’s paintings are filled with a similarly improvised musical expressiveness and irreverent spirit of performance to her music.
The exhibition features a new series of Boo Saville’s colour field paintings, which are shown in dialogue with a number of black and white canvases. Known formerly for her figurative works in oil on canvas, as well as using everyday materials including biro and bleach, Saville has – since 2014 – been producing large-scale, abstracts, made up of flawlessly-gradating shades. Saville, whose work investigates mortality, applies up to forty layers of paint to achieve this extraordinary effect, erasing any suggestion of her own mark-making in spite of the emotional tenor of the works. The colour fields are inextricably linked to her black and white canvases, the subjects of the latter – sparingly painted so as to retain the appearance of the canvas weave – resulting from internet searches that occur to her whilst working on the abstracts. She notes: “The black and white paintings are purely about the surface of momentary thought and the colour fields are about the depth and vault of emotion and memory layered on top of each other.”
