27 June - 27 July 2013 at Simon Oldfield Gallery, London.
Simon Oldfield is pleased to present Portrait of a Life Half Known, bringing together four solo presentations of new work by Juno Calypso, Simon Foxall, Kay Harwood and Ryan Leigh.
Portrait of a Life Half Known explores the notion of a single human force wielding power from a reclusive position; a totem for the power of suggestion, magnified by mystique. Each artist takes a separate room of the gallery to present new work that creates their own narrative of suggestion, the half-known and the unsaid.
We are also pleased to announce that Simon Foxall, Kay Harwood and Juno Calypso are now represented by the gallery and join our current stable of artists, including Ryan Leigh.
Juno Calypso, b. 1989, lives and works in London. BA Photography, LCC, University of the Arts London, 2012. Winner of the Catlin Art Prize Visitor Vote, 2013; LCC Hotshoe Portfolio Award, First Prize 2012; 2012 Michael Wilson Award, First Prize and recently featured in The Sunday Times, Time Out and The Independent. Calypso presents a new body of elaborately staged and finely detailed photographs that explore the life of her alter-ego, Joyce.
Simon Foxall, b. 1983, lives and works in London. MA Fine Art, Painting, Royal College of Art, London, 2012. BA Painting, Brighton, 2006. In Foxall's new paintings and wallpaper, he appropriates images of high and low culture, and so highlights the obsession with myth-making, significance and hierarchy. His work questions the parameters of sincerity, reality, individuality and self-expression in culture today.
Kay Harwood, b.1978, lives and works in London. Post-graduate Diploma, Royal Academy Schools, 2004 and BA Fine Art, Slade School of Art, 2001. Harwood's new paintings examine the male figure as represented in western portraiture and popular culture, playing with the iconography and mythology of the hero and modern male muse. Exploring the idea of the drifter, the rambler, the wandering man, where the unobtainable quality of the transient fictional figure becomes a potent and alluring force. The compositions and subject matter encourage the viewer to rest with the image, in a beguiling process of untangling the narratives hidden within.
Ryan Leigh, b.1987, lives and works in London. BA Fine Art, Wimbledon College of Art, London, 2009. Leigh presents intensely detailed work investigating the different belief systems present within society and 'highlights the futility of the search for an objective truth.' Family Tree comprises ten drawings, which explore the historical symbolism of the tree as a feminine source of life, 'The Great Mother controlling the fertilizing waters and cycles of life'. The trees are placed within an oval aperture traditionally reserved for portraiture, constructing each one as a portrait of a spiritual personality.
These works are presented alongside Leigh's Blue Sky Studies, which are built with a fluidity of light and quick marks that are in sharp contrast to the intensity and slow pace of the Family Tree series; exploring the tension between the permanent and temporal.