GUISE Collective presents
Further From Heaven
18th – 31st October 2019
Private View on Friday 18th October, 6pm - late
Closing Party on Halloween, 6pm – late
Hotel Elephant, 5 Spare Street, SE17 3EP
Open 7 days, 8am - 6pm
Abbie Davies
Adam Baker
Liberty Antonia Sadler
Minjoo Kim
Natalie Anastasiou
Sonia Wynn
“In every dream home a heartache
And every step I take
Takes me further from heaven
Is there a heaven?”
Roxy Music, 1973
A curious menagerie of fictional characters emerge, appearing in a state of ecstatic chaos, simultaneously celebrating and mourning; revealing the toxic influence of consumer culture through new modes of painterly portraiture.
Juxtaposing playfulness & pleasures with ominous subtexts, GUISE Collective has brought together a group of artists, each exploring themes of urban loneliness, champagne socialism, indulgence & its consequences.
Challenging the traditional male gaze within painting, ‘Further From Heaven’ celebrates female, genderfluid & non-heteronormative voices in the sphere of contemporary 2D practice.
Transforming a social space into a world of isolated personas, curated to sit amongst the audience during their everyday coffee rituals; GUISE injects the space with private narratives creating a collective conversion of desire & despair.
About GUISE Collective
GUISE Collective is the curating duo Natalie Anastasiou & Liberty Antonia Sadler; creating a platform of experimental exhibitions featuring multidisciplinary art practices and emerging artists. Taking over a vast variety of venues, GUISE creates unconventional gallery spaces, injecting art into the everyday and the unexpected.
Instagram: @guisecollective
Abbie Davies
Abbie Davies creates paintings that address consumer culture, fast fashion, food branding and advertising. Starting with digital images, the artworks are adaptations of late capitalistic scenes made by resin varnish to diminish signs of painterly gesture. Davies' 'packaged paintings' create a unique feeling of looking at the artwork like a product itself.
www.abbiedaviesartist.com / Insta: @abbiedaviesartist
Adam Baker
Adam Baker is an abstract-figurative painter working in oil paint to explore Queer themes and the tragicomic realities of human existence. His narrative-based work, informed by his own memories and lived experiences, highlights the performative nature of life & the darkly comic realities of Queer existence.
www.adambakerart.co.uk / Insta: @adamevebaker
Liberty Antonia Sadler
Liberty Antonia Sadler is an artist & filmmaker based in London, working with mediums of drawing, text and moving image to explore issues of body politics; she uses characters, radical softness & raw playfulness to discuss themes of abjection, vulnerability, queerness, food, & the erotic.
www.libertyantoniasadler.com / Insta: @libertyantoniasadler
Minjoo Kim
Minjoo Kim is a London-based narrative painter who were born and raised in South Korea. Kim’s work addresses the formation and re-negotiation of cultural identity, drawing from her own experience growing up in a conservative Korean context. The figures in her work radiate a feeling of discomfort; drawn from real-life but depicted in an imaginary setting, or as Kim describes it, ‘a virtual narrative’.
www.minjookim.net / Insta: @minjookim_
Natalie Anastasiou
Natalie Anastasiou’s practice decontextualises and dislocates whimsical characters from archival film footage and stills to form untold narratives through painting, video art and installation. Capturing the opulence and excess of contemporary culture and addressing the gap between our growing self-awareness and social disconnection.
www.natalieartandevents.co.uk / Insta: @ natalieanastasiou
Sonia Wynn
Sonia Wynn is a London based artist using painting as a narrative form, often borrowing from old Hollywood and clashing memories of growing up in rural catholic Ireland. Her work explores a push and pull between the abstract and the figurative that is driven in part by colour and motif, echoing the landscape of ‘home’ and places she has lived.
www.soniawynn.com / Insta: @soniawynnartist
