The Scandalized Mask

24 May-27 Jul 2013

Overview

Josh Lilley is delighted to announce the opening of The Scandalized Mask - a group exhibition featuring Anthony Lepore, Brian Bress, Nick Devereux, and Peter Linde Busk. The show brings together four artists whose practices, in varying degrees, provide a screen within their works; blocking intention, while deferring response in the viewer. Ideas of concealment are explored through masquerades, costumes or veils - in turn expressing feelings of uncertainty and the mystical. The exhibition's title comes from a seminal James Ensor picture - the first of his masked paintings. It references a self-conscious retreat to safety, hinting at notions of creative inferiority or awkwardness within an artist's practice. Through film, photography, drawing, and painting - suggestions of alienation, deformity and anxiety, are faced down amid a current of pathos, humour and the surreal; brought to light by the clear thematic of portraiture that weaves its way through all four artists's work.