Overview
"I use nature in a way that I am not making sketches of nature or trying to do nature painting or nature pictures. I am using nature in my own way to a much greater extent. I found that in nature there was something extremely neutral, like how things were placed; there was no planning at all" - Andreas Eriksson, 2011.
At a time of global pandemic and urban lockdown many of us are re-evaluating our relationship with nature on both a personal and a societal level. Communion with nature is ever more sharply highlighted for its existential importance - seeking solace and balance in nature is a time-tested way to recalibrate and regenerate the human condition. This presentation looks at how artists draw on that relationship and how it is reflected in their practice. They find inspiration, subject matter and material in nature and their works offer a meditation on time, the seasons, fleeting moments captured and savoured. A slow and immersive look at the natural world outside ourselves: an antidote for a time of dislocation and social isolation. ‘In Nature’, is a new presentation visible to Old Burlington street from the window of the gallery’s viewing room. The works on display can also be explored through the Online Viewing Room below.
At a time of global pandemic and urban lockdown many of us are re-evaluating our relationship with nature on both a personal and a societal level. Communion with nature is ever more sharply highlighted for its existential importance - seeking solace and balance in nature is a time-tested way to recalibrate and regenerate the human condition. This presentation looks at how artists draw on that relationship and how it is reflected in their practice. They find inspiration, subject matter and material in nature and their works offer a meditation on time, the seasons, fleeting moments captured and savoured. A slow and immersive look at the natural world outside ourselves: an antidote for a time of dislocation and social isolation. ‘In Nature’, is a new presentation visible to Old Burlington street from the window of the gallery’s viewing room. The works on display can also be explored through the Online Viewing Room below.
Highlights of the presentation include an expansive new painting by Swedish artist Andreas Eriksson that offers a meditative response to his rural surroundings in Medelplana; a totemic sculpture by Brazilian artist Tonico Lemos Auad that reveals the artist’s poetic use of materials from the natural world – in this instance reclaimed wood – to explore the personal and cultural significance afforded objects in everyday life; photorealistic paintings by Venezuelan artist Juan Araujo that reference archetypal depictions of the British countryside by John Constable; and a number of romantic paintings by British artist Ged Quinn that follow an isolated protagonist as he journeys through majestic and ethereal vistas. All of the artists are united in their evocation of time, memory and materiality in relation to nature.
"I use nature in a way that I am not making sketches of nature or trying to do nature painting or nature pictures. I am using nature in my own way to a much greater extent. I found that in nature there was something extremely neutral, like how things were placed; there was no planning at all" - Andreas Eriksson, 2011.
Mamma Andersson
MAMMA ANDERSSON. (This link opens in a new tab)., b. 1962, Swedish
Inspired by filmic imagery, theatre sets, and period interiors, Andersson‘s compositions are often dreamlike and expressive. While stylistic references include turn-of-the-century Nordic figurative painting, folk art, and local or contemporary vernacular, her evocative use of pictorial space and her juxtapositions of thick paint and textured washes are uniquely her own. Her subject matter revolves around melancholic landscapes and nondescript, private interiors.
In 2018 Andersson won the Daniel And Florence Guerlain Drawing Prize, a prestigious award honouring a living European artist. She was a co-curator of the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil and her solo exhibition ‘Memory Banks’ opened in October 2018 at Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati.
Andersson’s works are included in prominent collections internationally, including Albright-Knox Art Gallery, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas; Hammer Museum, California; Museum of Contemporary Art, California; The Broad Art Foundation, California; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; Apoteket AB, Stockholm, Sweden; Bonnier Dahlins Stiftelse, Stockholm, Sweden; City of Stockholm, Stockholm, Sweden; Folkets Hus och Parker, Stockholm, Sweden; Göteborgs Konstmuseum, Gothenburg, Sweden; Kultur I Länet, Uppsala läns andsting, Uppsala, Sweden; Malmö Konstmuseum, Malmö, Sweden; Västerås Konstmuseum, Västerås, Sweden; Satens Konstråd/National Public Art Council, Stockholm, Sweden; Magasin III Museum and Foundation for Contemporary Art, Stockholm, Sweden and Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo, Norway.
Juan Araujo
JUAN ARAUJO, b. 1971, Venezuelan
Over the last twenty years, Juan Araujo has pursued a highly personal investigation of the history of Western culture, art history and modernism by making hyper-realistic paintings based on images found in printed materials or online.
Each exhibition of Araujo’s work is a dense forest of connections and references, a palimpsest of narratives directing our attention to the work of architects such as Luis Barragán, Pancho Guedes, Burle Marx and Lina Bo Bardi or artists including Josef Albers, Mark Rothko and Jorge Molder.
Since moving to Portugal from Venezuela, Araujo has become fascinated with the genesis of modern and postmodern architecture in Europe and how these ideals later travelled across the Atlantic to influence the development of twentieth century Latin American architecture. Examples include Oscar Niemeyer’s ‘Casa das Canoas’ (1953) in Rio de Janeiro; Lina Bo Bardis’ ‘Casa de Vidro’ (1951) in Sao Paulo and the Luis Barragán house (1948) in Mexico City.
In 2019, Araujo was the subject of a major solo presentation ‘Measurable distances of space and air' at PEER, London. In early 2015, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London held the first UK solo exhibition by Araujo. Araujo has exhibited widely throughout South America and internationally including solo presentations at Culturgest, Lisbon, Portugal (2018); Instituto Inhotim, Brumadinho, Minas Gerais, Brazil (2013) and Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain (2008).
His work is found in numerous public collections including Tate, London, UK; Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; Jumex Collection, Mexico City, Mexico and Instituto Inhotim, Brumadinho, Minas Gerais, Brazil.
Tonico Lemos Auad
TONICO LEMOS AUAD, b. 1986, Brazilian
Tonico Lemos Auad’s varied practice investigates materiality, sensuality, process and how people negotiate the space around them. Auad explores physical manifestations of belief, specifically looking at the personal or cultural significance afforded objects in everyday life. Often encompassing notions of architecture and landscape, Auad’s unique way of working subverts traditional techniques associated with craft such as embroidery, woodcarving and stonemasonry.
Jane Won, Head of Exhibitions at De La Warr Pavilion, writes that Auad’s works “are instantly appealing to many for their tactility and for the intense labour that is evidently involved in creating them. Close observation of the works is rewarded by finding intricate and delicate details. Go one step further and one becomes aware of their poetic associations enhanced by the considered space they are placed in – the result of the artist’s process of thinking through materials.”
This year Auad exhibits at Biennale Gherdëina VII in Ortisei, South Tyrol, Italy (curated by Adam Budack). In 2019, Stephen Friedman Gallery presented two separate solo projects by Tonico Lemos Auad and Mamma Andersson at Frieze London, winning the 2019 Frieze Stand Prize. In 2016, Auad was the subject of a major solo exhibition at De La Warr Pavilion in East Sussex, UK. In 2011, a collection of specially commissioned sculptures titled ‘Carrancas and Reflected Archaeology' were exhibited as part of the Folkestone Triennial in Kent, UK.
His work is included in the public collections of Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, New York, USA; Pizzuti Collection, Ohio, USA; San Diego Museum of Art, California, USA; West Collection, Pennsylvania, USA; FLAG Art Foundation, New York, USA; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California, USA; Zabludowicz Collection, London, UK; Tate, London, UK; Museum of Contemporary Art, Vigo, Spain; British Friends of the Art Museums of Israel, Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel; Pinacoteca de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil; and Instituto Inhotim, Brumadinho, Minas Gerais, Brazil.
Andreas Eriksson
ANDREAS ERIKSSON, b. 1975, Swedish
Andreas Eriksson's artistic practice is highly expansive, encompassing a wide range of media including painting, photography, sculpture, tapestry and installation. Eriksson's works often appear quiet and understated yet belie a poetic quality which has a lasting effect on the viewer. Since 2000, the artist has lived and worked in Medelplana, Sweden in a house situated in the midst of a forest on the south bank of Lake Vänern. Small events and phenomena from his everyday life and the natural world become the outset for his works, giving his formal, conceptual and perceptual decision-making process a firm context.
Eriksson's work often embraces dualities such as inside and outside, lightness and heaviness, illusion and reality. His work hovers enigmatically between the abstract and the figurative, and is simultaneously familiar and mysterious. The emotional intensity with which Eriksson imbues his work is the result of a sustained exploration of his response to the natural world.
Eriksson represented Sweden as part of the Nordic Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011). Eriksson's works are included in prominent international collections such as Centre Pompidou, Paris; FRAC, Auvergne; MUMOK, Vienna; Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo; Gothenburg Museum of Art, Gothenburg; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Skövde Art Museum, Skövde and National Public Art Council, Sweden.
Ged Quinn
GED QUINN, b. 1963, British
British artist Ged Quinn is renowned for his densely layered paintings that combine symbolic and surreal elements and transform art historical references into contemporary experience. Richly layered with meaning and symbolism, Quinn’s works combine complex histories and mythological references with the traditions of landscape, still-life and genre painting. Drawing on inspiration from art history, Quinn uses paintings by artists such as Claude Lorrain, Caspar David Friedrich and Jacob van Ruisdael as source material to form multi-layered narratives. Themes of religion, politics, literature and film permeate his works. Yet with decidedly Surrealist undertones, Quinn's dream-like paintings resist interpretation.
Quinn’s third solo exhibition opened at Stephen Friedman Gallery in November 2019. Offering an emotional response to an imagined landscape, this new body of work represents an important shift in the artist’s practice and marks a departure from creating reproductions of paintings from art history. Notable solo and two-person exhibitions include: ‘Ged Quinn’, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, UK (2019–2020); ‘Richard Patterson | Ged Quinn', Galleria Mucciaccia, Rome (2018); ‘Rose, Cherry, Iron Rust, Flamingo’, Pearl Lam Gallery, Hong Kong, (2017); ‘Ged Quinn’, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, UK (2014); ‘Ged Quinn', New Art Gallery Walsall, West Midlands, England (2013-2014); ‘Endless Renaissance’, Bass Museum, Miami Beach, Florida (2012-2013); FOCUS,’ Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, USA (2012); ‘Ged Quinn,’ Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, UK (2010); ‘The Heavenly Machine’, Spike Island, Bristol, England (2005) and ‘Utopia Dystopia,’ Tate St Ives, St Ives, UK (2004).
Quinn’s works are included in prominent collections internationally, including: Tate, London, England; Victoria & Albert Museum, London, England; British Museum, London, England; Olbricht Collection, Essen, Germany; FLAG Art Foundation, New York, USA; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, USA and Tel Aviv Art Museum, Israel.
