Inside, Outside, Above, Below
Mark Wright, Tracy Grayson, Robert Davies, Oliver Marsden
5 December, 1996 – 31 January, 1997
Exhibition
The Spencer Brownstone Gallery is pleased to announce inside, outside, above, below, an exhibition of recent British and American painting and photography. The exhibition explores how the loss of ability to experience and visualize the real world becomes a charting of actuality, distance and space, a measure of incomprehensibility. The exhibition opens December 5 and runs through January 31, 1997.
Mark Wright's paintings create a dialogue between picture space and surface so that distance and illusion emerge. Images from a wide range of natural phenomena are mediated via photographs of rivers and clouds as well as microphotographs whose subject matter exploits the micro-macro perception of scale and space. The paintings offer contemporary interpretations of the Romantic tradition as explored by artists from Friedrich to Richter. Wright, who is from England, has appeared in several solo and group exhibitions in London, and has won the British Council Award in 1993 and 1994.
New York painter, Tracy Grayson has developed a painting vocabulary in which the pictorial and the abstract merge to form a representation of the infinite. Grayson has had solo exhibitions at Christine Burgin gallery, Wolff gallery and White Columns in New York. He has also participated in several group exhibitions at such galleries as Ronald Feldman, Annina Nosei, and Lorence Monk. Reviews of Grayson's exhibitions appear in publications including Artforum, Artpress, Art in America, The New York Times and the Village Voice.
British artist, Robert Davies, demonstrates how closely conventional photography comes to achieving the aims of monochrome painting. His work offers a surprising realization of secondary significance, that the photographs are pictures of clouds photographed from an aircraft window. Davies achieves a way in which to invert the expected, making a terrain of the sky spanning scores of miles instead of an imaginary beyond. His photographs are developed on a special matte paper that absorbs light, and then mounted on wood in a process that recalls a stretched canvas. Davies has had solo exhibitions at Salama-Caro Gallery and the Photographers Gallery in London, and his work is published in Inside Information and The Body, both by William E. Ewing.
British artist Oliver Marsden challenges our understanding of space and matter with minimalist acrylic paintings that assert a sense of orientation. Marsden derives his painterly concept from an inner sense of wholeness emerging from the experience of its impossibility. Marsden received the Arthur Anderson prize for Best Young Artist at the 134th Royal Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts Exhibition as well as a prize at Edinburgh College of Art for the most outstanding painter, and also was chosen for the East Wing Exhibition at the Courtauld.
Artist Bio
Participating artists:
Robert Davies, Tracy Grayson, Oliver Marsden and Mark Wright