Karolina Albricht’s paintings derive from a private imaginative space. Continuously, she’s negotiating new configurations of form, colour and surface. Painting, to her, is an attempt to generate an active space, an environment which can be perceived and responded to through our intellectual and physical faculties, through the sum of our senses.
Carolyn’s paintings are concerned with reflections, recollections and memories of the poetic in the everyday. It is these moments that she finds interesting, as she uses paint to memorialise the the insignificant. Often recording events by phone, her images are paired down to their essential composition. The paintings begin with a stained coloured ground, which is wiped on prior to working on the composition. That colour remains as a constant, permeating to the surface, as a reminder of the memory of an event.
Kiri is interested in how the body is often a vehicle for how others try to define our place in the world and the actions we take to either conform to this role or rebel against it. Mental health is a constant underlying theme in her work, as she often uses painting as a way to navigate her way through challenging emotions and memories.
She combines imagery of the natural world and the physical body to communicate universal feelings of love, loss and pleasure. She intends for her work to act as an emotional bridge between herself and the viewer.
Hannah was awarded a scholarship from Chelsea College of Arts where she graduated with her MA Fine Art in 2013. Press: Guardian Guide, Telegraph, How to Spend it Magazine, Wall Street International Magazine, Hunger TV. Exhibitions: London, LA, Berlin, New York, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur. Collections: Smurfit, Astra Zeneca and Charnwood Council and Special Collections Chelsea.
Coming from an Eastern European background, then thrown into a Westernised upbringing in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, Anna’s practice functions as a form of rose-tinted voyeurism into an idealised Western culture. The culture she was born into both fetishizes and demonizes American consumer culture - Anna’s practice reflects this duality. She approaches food, consumerism and addiction with a contemporary Pop Art vernacular, using Kristeva’s Powers of Horror as a key reference point. She has put herself between Malevich and McCarthy and is on a mission to marry destitute bleakness with inconceivable excess in her practice.
For the works presented at Small Works Gallery, Carl is exploring the reality of the immediately visible and the suggestions that painting can create, looking at socio-political trends, with particular interest to the rise of the far-right movement, and the movements of protests and resistance all over the world. Every painting is born out of the ‘realʼ as most of his source material is taken from the immediate world around him (social networks, the artistʼs own photographs, the news and the internet at large). At a first glance, the work suggests pretty clear narratives, but at a second look, it seems to imply something else. With influences as diverse as Edward Hopper, Francis Bacon, Abstract Expressionism and the Old Masters, this body of work creates new tensions distilled from the use of oil paint with the layering of both overt and implied meanings.
In these paintings, motifs are borrowed from surroundings and memory to create a non-place where the familiar and unknown are juxtaposed next to one another. Through the idea of non-place, the possibility of acceptance and inclusion is sought out. Acceptance of the unknown and inclusion of the queer are the promises of the non-place.
Farnaz Gholami is a recent graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art, currently living and working in London. She was born in Ireland, grew up in Iran, and lived in the USA and South Africa, before settling in London, UK in 2016.
“My current painting research explores the relationship between the painted image (the meaning, the immaterial, the metaphor, the mind) and the material presence in the painting (the corporeal, the touch, the physical presence, the body). Although the metaphysical element is present, the work always relies on the material possibilities as a starting point. I paint loosely observed details of the world around me. I often use the natural world and simple moments as departure points, reinforcing the importance of everyday experience.”
Ben’s work is an investigation of the ‘exotic’ in relation to colonial and Eurocentric viewpoints. To confront such cultural biases, Ben has relocated to Bogotá, Colombia and continues to explore notions of shared history and human experience. He is interested in how the viewer can relate to and empathise with the ‘imagined other’ through stories and images. Ben combines found images with observational drawings to create a fantastical realism with narratives referencing folk-lore and mythology, with work that transforms into living things in themselves.