Objects

Axel Obiger, working in collaboration with PAPER will draw together the practices of 16 artists working in both Berlin and the United Kingdom. Each artist attempts to disrupt the notion of still life, and reinterpret this genre of art. Still Life was considered the lowest genre of art, and yet in the composition of objects, artists can imply a great deal. Frances Morris wrote of Picasso's still lives, they are "capable of evoking the most complex blend of pathos and defiance, of despair to hope, balancing personal and universal experience in an expression of extraordinary emotional power. The hardship of daily life, the fragility of human existence and the threat of death. These themes permeate through the genre where they remain ever present to this day, simmering below the surface.
In the heyday of Dutch still lives, craftsmanship was crucial. Objects were arranged with precision, emphasising light and shadow, in order to create a compositional tension. Each object was selected for its symbolic meaning, highlighted through the drama of the composition. Observers marvelled at the Trompe l'oeil effect, freezing the objects in time; a study of death. Peter Hock's charcoal drawings make use of these qualities from still life painting, taking them to extremes of chiaroscuro. Light falls on an object rendered in monochrome, depicted by Hock as “abstract realism”. Merja Kokkonen is interested in nature, bodies and their movement, birth, death, and religious practice. If figurative vanitas still lives of the early modern era remind us of the ephemerality of pleasure and the inevitability of death, then medieval saint’s relics offer us much more direct interactions with once-living matter. The very physicality of the preserved body, defying time and decay, can be seen as a reminder of the miracle of existence, a memento nasci (remember that you must be born).
David Hancock's paintings fluctuate between the subject and object. Painted meticulously from a still life diorama, they incorporate lives of Surrealist artists drawn from Hancock’s interpretation of their work. In his staged sets, they become avatars to inhabit and experience the real and imagined world of the artist’s studio. For Louise Bristow, one of the pleasures of making is the juxtaposition of objects that in reality would not be found in the same time or space. She accentuates the mismatch of scale and a collision of visual languages in the set-ups: she will place a realistic three-dimensional architectural model next to a flat image of a landscape, an abstract geometric form and a scrap of coloured paper. To her everything is simply ‘material’ and there is a democracy to how she treats everything.

Caitlin Griffiths explores the relationship between reality and individual identity, drawing on photography's means to observe and document place, people and performance. Her still lives pairing an unopened box and with an open box references Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment. Reality is only summoned into existence through the act of observing it. Hannah Wooll employs found images from books and objects found in charity shops. She transforms these items into a self contained still life, repurposes them with her cast of lost girls. Niina Lehtonen Braun uses collaged items: alcohol bottles, flowers, clocks, cakes, coffee-cups, cigarettes, laundry etc. These objects have a certain domestic resonance. They suggest the passing of the time? The passing of a life? Her still lives are an opportunity to reflect on death; a momento mori. Similarly, Lisa Wilkens will show Objects of Solace, a series of pencil and watercolour drawings that mark a time in her artistic practice where drawing became a tool to immerse oneself in details and textures during time of grief.

Lisa Denyer creates mixed-media paintings that toy with the idea of their function as object, shifting between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional, they are neither wholly painting or sculpture. Louisa Chambers’ recent work responds to the idiosyncrasies in architecture (ornamentation, pattern, shape, surface and structure). Appropriated patterns from walls, fences, floors are translated onto architectural paper and transfigured into a temporary three-dimensional structure. These forms are recorded from observation becoming an abstracted still life. She is interested in the patterned tessellations that are on the surface of these forms and when manipulated create other spaces, angles and areas of illusion. Matthew Macaulay’s paintings have been developed through observations and experience of objects. The formal elements of objects, such as texture, pattern and colour, are extracted and combined within the works. The paintings attempt to capture the elusive nature of the natural world by transforming and cloaking elements through the creation of painterly signs, drawn from a large still life constructed from a mixture of artworks and other objects from the studio.
Jeffrey Knopf defamiliarises objects – often relics from museum collections – and represents them through incongruous contemporary materials. Angela Tait works primarily with clay and the formal qualities of the vessel. She is interested in the material and conceptual overlaps between domesticity and a creative practice. Together these artists present a collection of individual and collaborative works that explore the interplay between materials, creating propositions and extraordinary new narratives. For Gabriele Künne, abstract objects and object systems, whose indeterminate and indeterminable forms develop out of urban experience, play an essential role in her sculptural work. Künne presents objects made of papier-mâché that contain the glut of daily information contained within the pulp of news, fragmented and legible.
Ruby Tingle's recent works blur the line between object and image; the imagined textures of her paper cut-outs inform a new three dimensional situation in which the collages now exist, their landscapes flitting between pictorial space and fragments of mythical skin. Maja Rohwetter follows a structured conceptual approach to painting that includes the diffuse and the rational, questioning the variables in construction of a picture and representations of reality. As objects are arranged and composed in the classical still life, Rohwetter arranges the picture elements of her collages. The act of arranging and composing is essential and always visible, the picture is a snapshot of a temporary condition. A still.
Louise Bristow

Sketch for Creation Ritual
gouache on paper,
50 x 25 cm
2016
700 Euros

Sketch for Energy Ritual
gouache on paper,
25 x 50cm
2016
700 Euros

Louisa Chambers

Split
Gouache on card
22 x 16 cm
2020
300 Euros

Join
Gouache on card
16 x 22 cm
2020
300 Euros

Flip I
Gouache on paper
18 x 26 cm
2020
300 Euros

Upstanding
Gouache on card
22 x 16 cm
2017
300 Euros

Ziggurat
Gouache on card
22 x 16 cm
2017
300 Euros

Lisa Denyer

Big Twin
acrylic, filler, collage and clay
21x13x10cm
2019
500 Euros

Caitlin Griffiths

Alter / Altar (Narcissus) Black
Digital Photograph. Colour print on Pinnacle Satin paper
Edition of 5
59 x 42cm
2018
300 Euros

Alter / Altar (Envy) Gold
Digital Photograph. Colour print on Pinnacle Satin paper
Edition of 5
59 x 42cm
2018
300 Euros
David Hancock

Emmy
Watercolour on Gesso Panel
18 x 10cm
2022
750 Euros

Leonor
Watercolour on Gesso Panel
18 x 10cm
2022
750 Euros

Francis
Watercolour on Gesso Panel
18 x 10cm
2022
750 Euros

Peter Hock

Fold
Charcoal on Paper
44 x 64cm
2019
2250 Euros

Skin
Charcoal on Paper
68 x 49cm
2021
2250 Euros

Jeffrey Knopf & Angela Tait

Echoes
Digital Printed Plastic, OSB wood and porcelain 
20 x 20 x 20cm
2022
700 Euros

Merja Kokkonen
Erään Ekosysteemin Kehitys (Development of an Ecosystem)
Monotype
910 x 570 cm
2022
900 Euros
Niina Lehtonen Braun

Blue Haired Painter: Untitled (You are a good faithful little beast)
Collage, ink, acryl and watercolour on paper
85 x 104 cm
2023
1500 Euros

Table Situation: Untitled (On tässä kaupungissa vaikeaa / It's hard in this city)
Collage and watercolour on paper
59 x 42 cm
2018
800 Euros

Matthew Macaulay

Frame
Acrylic on Paper
30 x 21cm
2019
250 Euros

Edges
Acrylic on Paper
21 x 14cm
2019
180 Euros

Cables
Acrylic on Paper
21 x 14cm
2019
180 Euros

Maja Rohwetter

Gemischte Gefühle #7
Collage, C-Print, oil, watercolor, ink on paper,
30x40 cm,
2019
800 Euros

Delicate Balance
Collage, C-Print, oil, watercolor, ink on paper,
88 x 59cm,
2022

Ruby Tingle

Green Coil II   
Paper, leather, plastic, dye  
11 x 14 x 10 cm
2020
300 Euros

Peach Squeeze  
Collage & plastic on pic,
15 x 19 x 5 cm  
2020
300 Euros

Lisa Wilkens

Objects of Solace #1
Pencil & Watercolour on Found Paper
39 x 47cm (framed)
2012
550 Euros

Objects of Solace #2
Pencil & Watercolour on Found Paper
39 x 47cm (framed)
2012
550 Euros

Objects of Solace #3
Pencil & Watercolour on Found Paper
39 x 47cm (framed)
2012
550 Euros

Objects of Solace #4
Pencil & Watercolour on Found Paper
39 x 47cm (framed)
2012
550 Euros

Hannah Wooll

Parting
Acrylic & Ink on Linen
15 x 10cm
2019
300 Euros

Vanishing Point
Acrylic & Ink on Hard Back Book Cover
26 x 21cm
2018
300 Euros

Installation Views