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Open Friday to Sunday, 12noon - 6pm, or by appointment.
Private view: Thursday 16th July 2009, 6:00 - 9pm
On immediate impact (somehow the boxing/car crash metaphor seems utterly apt), Kate Lyddon's paintings depict a world of abandon and excess. In these acute quasi-narratives (nonetheless Grand for all that) scraps of paper and real hair trail across the canvas like discarded clothes. There is something deliberately seedy here but any element of Bacon is much much younger and lighter (more legible? a less bleary eye?) and the desolation is soaked in snakebites not champagne. A lurid saga of teenage disappointment rather than hard-won despair.
Bacon is off the hook then - indeed off the peg. There is no masochism but a gimlet eye that skewers like Van Dongen or Pfeiffer, and what looks like a merely fashionable confessional element in Lyddon's work is actually sharp-eyed observation. And scaled up, in the larger works the characters take on a hieratic quality, still like us only larger: allegorical figures from a Biblical or even Hindu epic - petty Gods obsessed by their own melodramas. Pop Idol reality TV Ramayana.
Studio 1.1
For more information or images contact:
Michael Keenan on 07952 986 696