Hales is delighted to announce Regions, a group show featuring works by Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Magda Blasinska, Steven Claydon, Ken Kiff, Rob Lyon, Kentaro Okumura, PIC and Laetitia Yhap. Regions explores place as experienced in regions of the mind – focusing on transformation, mental landscapes, and artistic invention.
Drawing on psychological connections to place, Regions delves into how the external world is internalized and transformed, from taking root in the artist’s mind and lingering in a pupal stage to emerging as fully realized artworks. In their cerebral gestation period, images of the world are subjected to the mind’s eye — emotion, belief systems, memory, and histories. The exhibition ventures into this intangible realm, which is beyond physical restraints and where artworks are part of the artist’s psyche. Regions brings together contemporary practitioners such as Steven Claydon, Rob Lyon and Magda Blasinska, with the estates of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Ken Kiff and PIC, showcasing how this cross-generational group of UK based artists examine different qualities of the natural world.
Barns-Graham's paintings convey her experience of nature and the motion of wind through an energetic abstraction - visualising natural phenomena is a theme explored throughout her oeuvre. Blasinska applies a formal rigour to large- and small-scale paintings, which draw on her memories of a post-Soviet upbringing in rural Poland and her present experience of living in the UK. Okumura's evocative abstract paintings are made through initial observations and an osmosis of memory, alluding to architectural elements in layered works. PIC (the artist pseudonym of Charles Higgins) creates a miniature world on a razor blade box in poetic, imagined scenes. In Kiff's pursuit of an arresting image, he imbues symbolic values to recognisable motifs from the natural world - the sun, a hill, a tree. In detailed paintings, Claydon invokes the topographic and a spatial interplay with intersecting lines and insects that are reminiscent of a Dutch still life. Lyon considers how we participate in the landscape through a visual lexicon of mark making and motifs, composing paintings from repeating dots, dashes and triangles. In Yhap's watercolour still life, she foregrounds tumbling cherries with a backdrop of the beach, in a diamond composition echoing her paintings made on unusually shaped panels. Hayward's sensitive watercolour explores the transformative quality of changing light on an environment. In distinct visual languages, the works in this show have restrained colour palettes and deeply rich surfaces, which highlight the transformative nature of artmaking.