Friday 20th - Saturday 28th October
Private View : Friday 20th October 6-8pm
Meet The Artist Gallery Talk : Thursday 26th October 6pm
Zoe Benbow presents a solo exhibition of paintings that take the subject of trees as their starting point. In recent memory, when covid restrictions have meant that we all had to stay closer to home - for London folk like Zoe, the tree became a symbol of an accessible wilderness on our doorstep.
These paintings conversely also reference distant landscapes as remembered in an urban context and use drawings and photographs gathered ‘out in the field’ as source material. By exploring the same motifs and images over a long period of time and through the labour intensive medium of oil paint, the paintings aim to evoke a poetic rather than representational interpretation of the subject. The paintings are not about a specific time and place but rather imply a sense of landscape, employing a little reverie and magic within a landscape of the minds eye.
There are no people in these paintings and it is the intention that we, the person looking at the canvas becomes ‘the figure in the landscape’. In this way Zoe alludes to the established modernist tradition of abstract art, where the painting ‘exists’ or happens between it’s self and it’s audience, creating a sense of an event that is always in the present. Zoe attempts to explore how best to present landscape through the historical convention of painting and what this may mean in the context of our climate crisis, although this remains of course a gargantuan maze impossible to exit.
Opening Times:
Friday 20th October 12-3pm, Saturday 21st October 10-3pm
Thursday 26th - Saturday 28th October 10-3pm