Victoria Crowe: Resonance of Time

8 Apr-21 May 2022

Overview

Flowers Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition by acclaimed artist Victoria Crowe, newly represented by the gallery.

The exhibition Resonance of Time continues Crowe's long-running investigation into the metaphysical landscape, and our relationship to nature, real and transmuted.

Crowe is widely known for her winter landscapes in which observations of everyday experience are transformed into the strikingly unfamiliar through symbolic associations with dream and memory. Often painted from recollections of walking at dusk, she captures the fleeting moments in which the natural world appears abstracted, from the luminous silhouettes of winter trees to the quietude of softened hillside landscapes blanketed by snow.

Through their subtle attention to surface, Crowe's paintings mark a journey of discovery, revealing an abiding interest in the patina of age, and the visceral evidence of wear and tear. Her process of layering and scraping back to uncover glimpses of underpainting reveals a sensitivity to the progress of time, pointing towards contrasting elements of fragility and permanence.

Crowe’s works are frequently described as having a strong spiritual quality, evoking transcendent experiences witnessed through landscape. Trees are rendered with acute clarity, their delicate tracery of bare, threadlike branches set in stark contrast to the bleached northern sky in Still, In the Snow, or incandescent in the foreground of a darkening forest in Language of the Night.

Often, a low blaze of crimson on the horizon signals the transitory moments of twilight, bringing forth elements of dream and the strong visual memory of place. Crowe describes the twilight within her works as reflective of an inner life, indicating a transitional and contemplative state between beginnings and endings. This is seen, for example, in the flashes of jewelled colour against the lengthening shadows and fading light of Shining of a Late Sun. As Crowe says, “for me, it is a positive honouring of past event and memory - melancholy is underrated.”