Patrick Heide Contemporary Art is delighted to present Breeder, a group exhibition that brings together six artists that are part of a new initiative to showcase young artists and talents in whose artistic message and future the gallery strongly believes.
Breeder has been introduced on the gallery’s website as a new section before the summer and will constantly be updated with new works. It will also regularly introduce other emerging artists and recent graduates that the gallery considers to be particularly noteworthy to follow:
The artists forming the launch show of Breeder are Sarah Bridgland, Pius Fox, Peter Matthews, Katherine Murphy, Saad Qureshi and Kate Terry. In line with one emphasis of the gallery program on works on paper, two of the artists work only in that medium, Sarah Bridgland and Peter Matthews. The latter as well as Kate Terry and Pius Fox have all chosen abstraction on different levels as their artistic language. Katherine Murphy and Saad Qureshi represent a more conceptual approach, both rooted in very personal experiences.
Sarah Bridgland is working mainly with two and three-dimensional collage. The RCA graduate combines cut-outs from old magazines with drawn imagery to create intimately scaled paper sculptures and abstract compositions inspired by modernism. Much of her imagery plays with visual memory, recomposing its tracks and traces in a kaleidoscopic manner.
Mainly working with oil on paper, Pius Fox's works move between painting and drawing, between figurative and abstract, between form and context. His subject matter originates from the interior of his studio, windows, doors, curtains, facades, introspective in atmosphere, yet formally looking outwards. Firmly rooted in modernism departing from constructivism and cubism, the Berlin painter branches out into more painterly styles reminiscent of Diebenkorn and Hockney while evolving his very personal language.
Peter Matthews immerses himself into the sea with a wooden drawing board and waterproof pens. Directly exposed to the elements of nature, the drawings are an amalgam of thoughts, scribbles, observations and impressions that cross the artist's mind while floating in the water. Matthew's stream of consciousness fuses with a type of automated drawing created by the chance movements of the ocean.
Katherine Murphy's conceptual works circle around the themes of everyday labour and their repetitive, dehumanizing tasks and results. Murphy uses repetition, an integral part of the human experience, to challenge the work system under investigation and experiments with its parameters. In her drawing series ‘Work’ Murphy was drawing as many shapes as possible of a certain type within normal working hours. The result borders on obsessive or even minimal mark making revealing a kind of twisted beauty.
Saad Qureshi‘s work evolves around identity, failed ideologies and the complex nature of the human psyche. For Breeder the Slade graduate constructed drawers with scorched landscapes that consist of images from a certain individual’s memory, accompanied by a series of drawings on carbon paper as imprints of the past, the imagery inspired by those memories. To allude to the shifting and fleeting quality of memories, the drawings are attached to the wall as hinged windows and the sculptures are mounted on wheels.