Kristian Day is delighted to present Landing, featuring work by Hannah Brown, Anna Freeman Bentley and Freya Douglas-Morris.
Variously depicting architecture, landscape and the figure, the work of each artist is notable for its highly personal use of pictorial space and engagement with materials. The show’s title – Landing – alludes to a state between the real and the imagined, a liminal space with regard to representing the visible world found in the work of each of the three artists. Each situates their work as existing in an in-between zone, one foot perhaps grounded in observation and experience, the other exploring memory, imagination, transition, waiting, mirroring, knowing and not knowing. Each explores the illusory nature of image-making, conjoining observation with narratives of memory and imagination, in work that often appears imbued by both presence and absence. Landing also represents the end of a journey undertaken in each artists practice, culminating in the work shown.
Freya Douglas-Morris (b. 1980, London) lives and works in London. She holds a BA from Brighton University (2002) and a painting MA Royal College of Art (2013)
"Away from a world of fast, sharp focussed images we are invited into a drift of figures located within an elsewhere of this excess.....a byway passage into what might never be shown" Jonathan Miles
Solo exhibitions include: Light For Company, Lychee One, London (2016) One place or another, Spazio Cabinet, Milan (2014)
Selected group exhibitions include: Artificial Arcadia, Bosse & Baum, London (2016) Paper, Publication, Performance, Lychee One, London, (2016) Carnival Glass, Block 336, London (2015) A Crazed Flowering, Frameless Gallery, London, (2015) 100 Painters of Tomorrow, New York, USA (2014) Elsewhere, (r)isse gallery & Transition Gallery, Varese (2014) East London Painting Prize, Bow Arts Trust, London (2014) Freya Douglas-Morris & Marita Fraser, Peter Von Kant Gallery, London (2014); Re-Define, Exhibition & Auction, Dallas Contemporary USA (2014); Catlin Art Guide & Exhibition, London (2014); Art Britannia, Miami USA (2013); New Sensation Saatchi Gallery London (2013); Paper, Saatchi Gallery, London (2013); RCA Degree Show, London (2013); Signs of the City, Drawing Room (off site) London (2013); and Big Rock Candy Mountain, MOT Project Space, London (2013).
Douglas-Morris has had residencies in Varese, Italy: with (r)isse Gallery & Transition Gallery (2014) Kuwait: Assisting an Art Residency programme with the RCA and British Council (2012/13); Barcelona: Residency and solo show, Pantocrator gallery (2011); Berlin: Residency (2008).
Hannah Brown (b. 1977, Salisbury, Wiltshire) lives and works in London. She is a graduate of Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design (BA hons Sculpture 1999) and the Royal College of Art (MA Sculpture 2006).
“These paintings are clearly a synthesis of the English landscape tradition and contemporary anxieties....Their exquisite appearance is located in the actual painting as object and not in any apparent or illusory sense of reality.” Graham Crowley
Recent solo exhibitions include A Lane to the Land, at 71 Blandford Street (2015), The Winter Girls, Milton Keynes Arts Centre (2015), Not Just Yet, Cross Gallery, Dublin (2015). Selected group exhibitions include Marmite Painting Prize 2016, Block 336 and Highlanes Gallery, Blow Up, Parafin, Finding Forms, Cross Gallery, and Arboretum, Royal West of England Academy. Her work is held in public and private collections within the UK and internationally, including the V&A, London and Office of Public Works, Ireland. In 2012 Hannah was shortlisted for John Moores Painting Prize and in 2014 and 2015 for the East London Painting Prize.
Anna Freeman Bentley (b. Freeman, 1982, London), lives and works in London. She holds a BA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art and Design (2004) and an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art (2010).
“There is something uncanny in Freeman Bentley’s works, something that goes beyond describing the atmosphere of a room or building, and into the realms of something darker or deeper—one might even describe it as spirit...” Matt Price
Freeman Bentley has had solo exhibitions at Husk Gallery, London (2015); The Ahmanson Gallery, California (2013); Workshop gallery, Venice (2012) and Kollaborativ Galerie, Berlin (2007). She has been artist-in-residence at the Florence Trust, London and with Michelin-starred restaurant, Pied à Terre, London. Selected group exhibitions include the East London Painting Prize, London 2014 and 2015; All Things New, Man&Eve Projects, London 2014; Some Domestic Incidents at MAC, Birmingham 2011; Prague Biennale 5, Expanded Painting, Prague, 2011 and Bloomberg New Contemporaries, 2009.