Valentina Liernur: PINTURAS GRISES

9 Jun-2 Jul 2022

PV 8 Jun 2022, 6-8pm

Overview

Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to present PINTURAS GRISES, an exhibition of new works by Valentina Liernur. For the artist’s second exhibition with the gallery and debut solo exhibition in London, Liernur continues her exploration of quotidian city life through a series of seemingly monochromatic figurative paintings that depict everyday life through the surreptitious gaze.

Liernur’s practice is anchored in an ongoing enquiry into the physical qualities and mark making capacity of oil paint on canvas. The artist’s expressive gestural marks and impasto bring abstraction and figuration together distorting the forms of her subjects’ creating tensions and slippages. This manipulation of the subject embeds each work with a distinct visceral quality, exacerbated by the compositions cropped, zoomed in focus, drawing the viewer further into each scene, and removing clear tangible locations from the works.

Liernur documents women during their everyday lives much like the female impressionists Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt, finding a place through these images to manifest herself in her translation of the world. Painting from her meticulously archived photos and employing emotive brushwork Liernur introduces an autotheoretical lens of the world in which she frames the fleeting passing gaze: eternalising the everyday and documenting the in-between moments of life. Forming a non-linear archive spliced together through a moulding of abstraction and figuration creating paintings that present the city through the fragmented eye of the observer.

Artists