Heidi Locher, Unmarked:
Broken Symmetries, Rod Barton, London EC1
21st November - 19th December, 2009
Private View: Thursday 19th November, 6 - 9pm
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Rod Barton is proud to present the first solo exhibition in
London by artist Heidi Locher.
Displayed in this exhibition are five new paintings from her new series of
work titled; Unmarked: Broken Symmetries.
This exhibition is accompanied by the following text written by David Mellor:
Unmarked: Broken Symmetries.
To begin to view these paintings we might remember the archaeology of a
particular type- an kenotic portrait -in Modernist figuration, made by painters
such as
Jawlensky or Malevich; elementary faces which re-vamped numinous heads crossed
by elementary marks. And then, perhaps to gain more historical perspective,
the opening of a more expressionist, painterly figuration, this time filling
and bursting the face portrayed with braided paint, from Velasquez to Matisse’s
dirtily brushed milliner wife in 1905, or, later, de Kooning.
As her recent paintings developed, Heidi Locher recognised two kinds
of face which were appearing on her canvasses: the emptied-out, kenotic,
and the full
one, replete and already assigned and cursed with patriarchal meanings. When
full, a purple lassoo declines to an apex below, to a ‘chin’: but
when empty it rises to a point above ( Ubu’s face, bound in a pastry
sack and claimed by gravity), dumb and unmarked, apart from the odd wipings
and dribble, like the upturned face of a pale and scarified Madonna.
The full ones, the ones full of painterly plenitude, are open heart
tissues of flesh as old, printed, medical photographs, paint as voluptuous
meat - what
Bacon wished for. The full ones are open-chested, like the preliminaries to
an autopsy. Here is a mire of flesh whose ‘fullness’ is composed
of the noise of the world.
Author of these paintings, Locher sees herself oscillating between
the empty and the full- for don’t both refer to women? And she has written and
wondered whether she should admit the noise of the world, to “let the
voices in” to the white faces circumscribed by those purple horse collars;
that is, to engorge them, to flood them with a register of jangles latent in
these pulsing purses of red and white paint, to live inside the empty-faced
ones.
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Heidi Locher completed her MA in FIne Art at
Central Saint Martins in 2006, previously she graduated as an
Architect from the Royal College of Art and subsequently setup
her own architectural practice, Paxton Locher Architects. Recent
exhibitions include Blyth Gallery, Imperial College, London,
Kingsgate Workshop
Trust, London and Jerwood Gallery, London.
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