Huxley-Parlour are delighted to announce The Silver Cord. A group exhibition presenting the work of seventeen international artists, exploring the role of the fantastical and the power of the imaginary in contemporary painting. Working across several genres, the artists included in the exhibition engage with notions of the idealisation of the natural, alternative visual realms and the potency of the fictional. As the title of the exhibition suggests, in reference to the metaphysical, the works by each artist seek to transport the viewer beyond the everyday; constucting alternate realms beyond the physical restraints of the present moment they create space for the imagination and offer different models for contemporary existence.
One minute and thirty seconds. This is the average length of a post in a news block. Since the beginning of 2011, with the beginning of the “Arab Spring”, Monika Huber (*1959) has been creating a digital archive of news images – the Archive OneThirty. It documents the worldwide political and social change in its media reflection and pictorial narrative construction. Designed as a long-term documentation, it currently includes around 40,000 photographs. Huber reworks these images, edits them by painting or drawing over them. The artist takes up the images that are usually lost in the daily flood of news in order to make them visible, tangible and reflective through editing. The media images she selects repeatedly show people as protesting and rebellious actors, as subjects and objects of public, political, often violent and warlike events.
Digestive, born (2022) out of a love of biscuits and chatting, is a monthly reflective publication from the Visual Communication BR13 studio at the Royal College of Art. We create content based on the collective theme of the month—designed, collected, and shared on a single piece of paper.
Making its colors slightly darker through the addition of minimal amounts of black paint, he is able to counter the overly brightening effect and visual depth that a glazing can achieve; and at the same time, it binds the colors in his work together. Viane creates a representation of reality that feels uncannily realistic in its pictorial detail, but is full of visual paradoxes and subtle irony. The use of a strangely deformed perspective, for example, allows him to combine a depiction the full frontal and side view of the objects in his paintings. This explains the estranging effect of An Angel’s Nest (2022) and Trestle of Trestles (2022), where we see the birdhouse and the trestles from angles that would normally exclude each other. Combined with the highly realistic depiction of the wood and the gradient skies, these paintings become the setting for subtly unsettling situations.
