5 October – 17 November 2012
137 Whitecross Street, London EC1Y 8JL
Open Thursday – Saturday, 12 – 6pm
In a moment of uncharacteristic ditzyness (no comment), I arrived a week early at CARSLAW St* Lukes in Whitecross Street, whilst they were in the middle of installing their forthcoming show by British artist, G L Brierley so I managed to get a sneak preview of coming attractions… talk about keen. G L Brierley is an intriguing young British painter, admired by many of you I know, who creates domestic scale and larger works that overtly allude to the history of painting, especially the genres of still-life and portrait painting in the 17th and 18th centuries. Abstract amalgamations of painterly surface and texture accumulate into discreet forms of representation – feathery moth-like forms, conch and flower-like assemblages – poised like formal arrangements, alert to being admired, in a darkened space left undetermined but psychologically unsettling. Arcimboldo meets Glenn Brown. Her palette is characteristically muddy, as if overloaded with centuries of varnish, and her surfaces often incorporate other materials – lace or wooden inlay for example – and break out into bruises of deep or vivid colour and hives of congealed paint that wrinkle and crack, making for a seductive but tragi-comic courtship with the viewer. For those of you who enjoy the dark side of technically accomplished painting, don’t miss this show during the hurly-burly of Frieze.
Image: G L Brierley, Fud, 2012, oil on wood, 53 x 46cm, courtesy the artist and CARSLAW St* Lukes.
