The Little Window Gallery: Tim Allen, Tom Norris and Naja Utzon Popov

27 Apr-19 May 2022

Overview

Our Little Window Gallery has been curated specially to celebrate the arrival of Spring this year. We are delighted to showcase the incredible work of Tim Allen, Tom Norris and Naja Utzon Popov. 

Since the 1970s, Tim Allen has been producing an exciting body of work in which colour and movement ‘aspires to the condition of the physical’. Allen’s paintings are made with traditional graining brushes, various other tools and custom built painterly devices that produce a parallel strokes and mesmerising effects.

His works on canvas are captivating, they bathe the eyes in pleasurable sensations and the multiple raking striations which cross the surfaces of the canvases have direction, drive, propulsion and energy. Allen’s process is a perpetual event of remaking and revisiting, dancing from the past to the present, and these paintings present more than the sum of their parts and they generate a broad response in whoever’s looking at them, emotionally and intellectually. 

Naja is innately influenced by the wealth of nature around her during her younger years, Naja's style embraces encounters with the environment which have been translated into a collection of sculptures, glassware and hand woven rugs. She has created gravity-defying clay sculptures for the Rosendahl corporate headquarters in Copenhagen and a design for a presentation sculpture was commissioned by the Institute of Architects in Barcelona. A monumental outdoor sculpture entitled 'Gathering', which rises from the ground like ancient columns formed from Welsh slate, was commissioned for the corporate collection of the Danish organisation, Humana.

Her work constantly surprises us with its raw beauty; the influence of her formative years in Australia can be seen in the formation and gestures of her ceramic works and drawings. 

Tom Norris articulates his passion for ceramics citing the vessels capacity to facilitate a hybrid exploration between object, culture and subject. Moving from the playful to the serious; from the simple to the sacrosanct, Norris presents these ideas as a layering of figuration and abstraction enveloping the surface of the vessel. At a developmental and exciting stage in his practice, Norris’s exploration of mark making hints at a narrative directed by the use of symbol, line and colour. The lack of a ‘full stop’ on the ceramic vessel allows for stories, characters and marks to make way for each other across and around his forms.