SUPERNATURAL
Installation Views
Exhibition Tour with Maeve Doyle
A highlight of our winter exhibition calendar, ‘Supernatural’ explores the uncanny beauty of life and the power of the imagination to open doors into other dimensions. Bringing together international emerging and established artists from all corners of the globe, the six-week-long show explores alternate realities of the everyday, transporting the viewer into a trance-like realm. Split over two levels of the gallery and focussing primarily on works on canvas, the exhibition takes the viewer on a journey through the mind of these talented young artists as it progresses from the figurative to the abstract.
The French painter Annabel Faustin’s joyful works feature giant women that represent her own private Eden in which humans and nature live in harmony. The French artist Timm Blandin, meanwhile, transports us to a fantastical California, where his paintings of landscapes and scenes from day-to-day life are suspended in time between dreams and reality.
Guiding the viewer into a more abstract universe, the Chinese artist Cheng Zhe’s ethereal children gaze at the viewer with eyes full of hope, sitting contemplatively on a fluffy cloud or conversing with nature. Bold and raw, the cacophonous, thickly impastoed paintings of Australian-born Jordy Kerwick feature mythical beasts with feathered headdresses, reimagined as taxidermy rugs.
Fresh from their show ‘Once Were Kings’ at Maddox Westbourne Grove, British artistic duo The Connor Brothers present a childhood apparition of a unicorn, juxtaposed with text that captures the constant pressure to be original as an artist.
Elsewhere, Spain’s Iván Montaña juxtaposes figures, words, facts and interactions in his vibrant conceptual paintings. Representing memories, moments, feelings and sensations experienced by the artist, each object, each being and each word emerges organically during the act of creation. Finally, with his dreamlike portals, the French street artist Kean takes us on a mystical journey between land and sea, space and light, marking the final step into another dimension.
"In ‘Supernatural’, dreams morph into reality and fantasy and desire are depicted as intimately connected with our daily lives, says Maeve Doyle, Artistic Director of Maddox. Manifestations of the mind, the works on show draw us into exciting new worlds of the artists’ making."
