Pippy Houldsworth Gallery is pleased to present Hypnagogia, a group exhibition comprising new work by Gabriella Boyd, Jadé Fadojutimi, Maria Farrar, and Makiko Kudo running from 22 June to 3 August 2018.
Hypnagogia refers to a transitional state of mind between wakefulness and sleep in which fluid, hyper-associative images are conjured. Drawing upon this type of consciousness, Pippy Houldsworth Gallery brings together a group of four young female artists whose paintings offer a lucid interpretation of reality. Using memories, dreams or archival materials as their reference points, each artist views the world around them through a subjective filter. Fluctuating between abstraction and figuration, the works in the exhibition encompass how each artist works indirectly from life to create new forms of meaning.
Gabriella Boyd captures the sensation of fleeting interactions in everyday life, often focusing on the trivial, 'in-between' moments that make up our domestic routines. Diffused tones and hazy forms allude to the 'given-ness' of objects, pointing to the evocative, sensory qualities that they possess. The artist explains that she is 'fascinated by how you remember a vivid dream. As time passes you might only recall a single frame or an emotion. This is a very liberating, useful method in terms of creativity.' Elements that evade Boyd's memory are sketchily delimited, with figures fragmented or obscured to encourage the viewer to fill in the gaps by using their own imagination.
For Jadé Fadojutimi, painting is comparable to gazing into a window pane, enabling the artist to see her own reflection, the wider context in which she lives, and the distorted fusion of these two images and how her identity is informed by, and bleeds into, her surroundings. This existential process enables Fadojutimi to unearth how her own sense of self is constructed, using the canvas as a type of sounding board as she grapples with the memories, both good and bad, of everyday experiences. As a result, her paintings convey inarticulable forms of emotion in vivid, expressive fashion.
Pinpointing the beauty of everyday minutiae, Maria Farrar captures fragments of memories just on the cusp of being forgotten; a four-leaf clover, a tray of biscuits, and the hurried movement of a laced boot are recreated in eidetic detail. These forms typically emerge from expanses of raw canvas or thin washes of paint, serving to emphasise the transitory nature of Farrar's narratives. Calligraphic in quality, her ghostly scenes are diffused through the lens of a bygone era.
Reality and fiction harmonise in Makiko Kudo's paintings, bringing forth dreams and recollections that have, in the artist's words, 'burned into [her] brain'. Redolent of the tragic wanderers that populate Caspar David Friedrich's sublime vistas, Kudo's characters are depicted in states of deep contemplation. Set against backgrounds of lush vegetation and brooding skies, these landscapes become analogous for the fictional realities in which Kudo's figures are engrossed. Formal characteristics are greatly intensified in her paintings, much like the photographic flash of a memory one suddenly remembers. Kudo's work encompasses a wider, generational trend in the late twentieth century in Japan to seek forms of escapism in the face of rigid, societal structures.
With many thanks to mother's tankstation, Dublin and London; Anthony Wilkinson Gallery, London, and Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo.
Biographies
Gabriella Boyd (b.1988, Glasgow) lives and works in London. She studied at Glasgow School of Art (2007-2011) and Royal Academy Schools, London (2014-2017). Previous exhibitions include Help Yourself, Blain|Southern (2018); Chumming, The Pipe Factory, Glasgow International (2018); Dreamers Awake, White Cube, London (2017), Royal Academy Schools Show (2017); Everyone is Rich Now Apparently, Supplement at 255 Canal St, New York (2017), and Gabriella Boyd & Marco Giordano, Art Park, Glasgow International (2016). Boyd was shortlisted for the John Moores Prize in 2016 and was commissioned by the Folio Society to illustrate a new edition of Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams in 2015. She is currently taking part in The London Open 2018 at the Whitechapel Gallery, London.
Jadé Fadojutimi (b. 1993, London) lives and works in London. She received her BA from Slade School of Fine Art and her MA from Royal College of Art, London, where she was awarded the Hine Painting Prize 2017. Last year, she was shortlisted for the Contemporary British Painting Prize and the Griffin Art Prize. Fadojutimi had her first solo exhibition at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery in 2017. Fadojutimi has forthcoming solo exhibitions at Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne (late 2018) and PEER, London (early 2019).
Maria Farrar (b. 1988, Philippines) lives and works in London. Currently, she has a solo exhibition with mother's tankstation, London and is included in the group exhibition Known Unknowns at Saatchi Gallery, London. Recent activities include a solo exhibition with Supplement Gallery, London, and a residency at the British School at Rome, awarded through the Derek Hill Foundation Scholarship (both 2016). Farrar also recently received the Melville Nettleship Prize at Slade School of Art, London, where she graduated with a Masters of Fine Art, Painting (2016). She received her BFA from Ruskin School of Art, Oxford (2012). Farrar is represented by mother's tankstation limited.
Makiko Kudo (b. 1978, Aomori Prefecture) lives and works in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan. Kudo's paintings have been acquired by Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; MOCA, Los Angeles; Olbricht Collection, Essen; UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Japan Foundation; Takahashi Collection, Tokyo; Ulster Museum, Belfast, and Saatchi Gallery, London. Solo exhibitions include those at Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo (2016) and Wilkinson Gallery, London (2015). Her work has been featured in group shows at Salon 94, New York; Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art, Shizuoka; Greene Naftali, New York; Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow; me Collectors Room Berlin; Metropolitan Opera, New York, and Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.
