Summer Reflections at JGM Gallery, London

19 Jun – Autumn 2020

All images courtesy of JGM Gallery and the artist

Repetition of a mark elevates its significance and invites patterns and symmetry to emerge. Summer Reflections reveals a deeper understand of the artist’s intention, as this double act creates an experience that enhances their narratives.

Karolina Albricht
Ralph Anderson
Dominic Beattie
Chris Daniels
Anthony Frost
Sally Gabori
John Hoyland RA
Albert Irvin RA OBE
Hannah Luxton
Lily Hargraves Nungarrayi
Naja Utzon Popov
Rammey Ramsey
Kitty Napanangka Simon
Jukuja Dolly Snell
Daniel Sturgis
John Walker
Alice Wilson

Karolina Albricht
Karolina Albricht’s (B.Krakow, Poland) paintings derive from a private imaginative space. Her work is rooted in figuration while operating within an abstract language of shapes and colour. She’s interested in creating an active environment where these shapes meet and become characters of their own, setting their own terms; a possible reality.
Following her graduation from the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow and Socrates-Erasmus at ArtEZ Institute of Fine Arts in Arnhem, the Netherlands in 2008 she moved to London. She has exhibited across Europe and participated in various competitions including ArtGemini Prize (Public Choice Award) and Arte Laguna Prize. She has been previously shortlisted for the Royal College of Art Summer Exhibition, the Threadneedle Prize and National Open Competition.

Ralph Anderson
Dedicated to painting, Ralph Anderson (b. 1977, Glasgow) brings together the transient qualities of light and the viscous nature of acrylic paint. This works hover between illusion and physical reality, investigating gesture, form and the drawn line whilst also playing with the notions of representation and non-representation in art. Recent career successes include two major solo exhibitions at JGM Gallery, commissions for H Club, London and an installation of work in Eurostar’s Business Premiere Lounge at the Gare du Nord in Paris.

Dominic Beattie
Dominic Beattie (b.1981, London) is an abstract painter/sculptor and furniture designer. His work is based upon Modernist principles, specifically ideas of innovation and experimentation with abstraction, and an emphasis on materials, techniques and processes. Beattie’s current output is concerned with the development of unique patterns and an exploration into the materiality of painting.
Beattie has recently exhibited his work at The Saatchi Gallery, The Royal Academy, JGM Gallery and Fold Gallery. In 2015 he won the UK/Raine prize for painting. In 2018 he curated the exhibition ‘Harder Edge’ (A Multigenerational Survey of Recent Abstraction) featuring 17 artists at The H Club, Covent Garden, and later toured to the Saatchi Gallery. In 2019 he co curated ‘HABITAT: artists making furniture or things that might be confused as furniture’ at JGM Gallery.

Chris Daniels
Chris Daniels (b.1981, Harrogate, UK) graduated from the Royal Acdemy Schools in 2008. He makes abstract paintings concerned with the principles of colour and form. His  geometries are taken from a range of selected elements – signs, shields, mountains, and through drawing, simplification and repetition these forms become ambiguous, reductive, and abstract. Using masking tape to control the painting gesture inside the hard-edged form, Daniels creates a visual tension between the shapes. With his mastered skills as a colour field painter, Daniels selects his colours intuitively, whilst always drawn to advertising as much as art history to deepen his understanding of colour relationships. Often working in series, he uses the same forms in different compositions and colours as a rule.

Anthony Frost
Anthony Frost (b.1951, St Ives) is noted for his abstract works consisting of brightly coloured prints and collages. His paintings include repeated motifs (lines, triangles and dots) and a mix of materials (acrylic, hessian, sail cloth, string and any other materials that come to hand). Although there is a degree of planning in each work, there is also an essential random chance element which manifests itself as the creative process progresses – adding a piece of material or making a mark that can change the painting’s direction in unforeseen ways.
His work is in a number of corporate, public and private collections including Bank of America, Lloyds TSB, The Nuffield Trust, John Moores, Contemporary Art Society, Whitworth Gallery (Manchester) and Standard Life.

Mirdidingkingathi
Juwanda Sally Gabori
The incomparable Sally Gabori’s (c.1924 -2015 Bentinck Island, Queensland, Australia) painterly interpretations of her Bentinck Island home combine country, colour and her mind’s eye, capturing the hearts of art lovers across Australia and all over the world. Her signature application of vivid colour and expressive brushstrokes brilliantly portray her island country and impart to the viewer a real and intimate sense of who Sally Gabori was and where she was from.
Gabori’s immense legacy was honoured in the major retrospective exhibition Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori: Dulka Warngiid – Land of All at the Queensland Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne in 2016/17.
Gabori’s success included many sell-out solo exhibitons and her work is in leading collections around the world. In 2006, she was a finalist in Queensland Art Gallery’s Xstrata Coal Emerging Indigenous Artists Award and the ABN Amro 2006 Emerging Artists Award. In 2007, she was a finalist in Darwin’s National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award and the Togart Contemporary Art Award.

John Hoyland RA
John Hoyland (UK, 1934 – 2011) was one of Britain’s leading abstract painters, renowned for his bold use of color and inventive forms. He spent significant time in New York and nurtured friendships with Robert Motherwell, Kenneth Noland, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko. It was at this time that Hoyland first encountered the work of European-born Hans Hofmann, who encouraged Hoyland to move at the end of the 1960s towards a more richly allusive non-figuration.
Hoyland has had major solo exhibitions and retrospectives at the Whitechapel Gallery (1967), The Serpentine Gallery (1979), the Royal Academy of Arts, London (1999) and Tate St Ives (2006). In 1969 he represented Great Britain alongside sculptor Anthony Caro at the São Paulo Biennale, Brazil. He won the prestigious John Moores Prize in 1982 and was elected a Royal Academician in 1991.

Albert Irvin OBE RA
Albert Irvin (London 1922 – 2015) was an English expressionist abstract artist. Born in London he was evacuated from there during World War II, to study at the Northampton School of Art before being conscripted into the Royal Air Force as a navigator. When the war was over, he resumed his course at Goldsmiths College where he would later go on to teach. His influences included Walter Sickert, Henri Matisse, JMW Turner, Jack Smith and Edward Middleditch.
He was elected to The London Group in 1955 and won a major Arts Council Award in 1975 and a Gulbenkian Award for printmaking in 1983. Irvin was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2013 Birthday Honours for services to the visual arts. His work is widely exhibited both in the UK and abroad, in such places as Arts Council of Great Britain, Birmingham City Art Gallery, the Chase Manhattan Bank, the Contemporary Art Society, Manchester City Art Gallery, Whitworth Gallery Manchester, Leeds City Gallery Tate Britain, the Victoria and Albert Museum Oxford University, Cambridge University and Warwick University Arts Centre.

Hannah Luxton
Hannah Luxton (b.1986, London) investigates feelings and visions of the natural sublime. Her paintings engage with the Romantic tradition whilst equally reaching much further back in time, finding an emotional kinship with the implicit sense of the sublime perhaps traceable within prehistoric art. This narrative is further enhanced by animistic currents which hint towards a higher spiritual dimension. Her paintings meditate upon her recurring motifs of universally recognised natural forms such as mountains, horizons, craters, lakes, storm clouds, stars and the moon.
Luxton works from her secluded studio within Epping Forest, UK. She graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art MA in 2012. Luxton has embarked on many artist residencies in order to bring her closer to the natural sublime. From the craters of Mt Etna, Sicily and the peaks of the Alps, to glaciers and waterfalls of Iceland and caynons and craters and deserts in the American wilderness.

Lily Hargraves Nungarrayi
Lily Hargraves Nungarrayi (b. 1930, Chilla Well NT, Australia) is one of the old Warlpiri Desert walkers, born in the Tanami Desert in her country near Jilla or Chilla Well in the Northern Territory, Australia. Her character and life experience is reflected in her paintings, as she is driven to record and preserve her culture through her visual language. Her expressive use of colour and a skilled techniques of bold brush work show a freedom that has developed from years of painting experience. Nungarrayi’s art is held in a number of major collections, and she has been widely exhibited both in Australia and overseas.

Naja Utzon Popov
Naja Utzon Popov (b. 1973, copenhagen, Denmark) is a Danish sculptor, textile designer and ceramicist who is internationally oriented in her work. After 6 years in Australia and 15 years in London, she is now back in her native Denmark, where she based in the old Burmeister & Wein shipyard in Copenhagen.
Innately influenced by the wealth of nature around her during her younger years, Naja’s style embraces encounters with the environment which have been translated into a collection of sculptures, glassware and hand woven rugs. She has launched her own exquisite rug ranges at the prestigious Maison et Objet in Paris, and ICFF in New York, as well as selected high end furniture stores. Naja works directly with architects and interior designers to create unique and site specific artworks and rugs.

Rammey Ramsey
Rammey Ramsey’s (b. 1935 Bow River Station, The Kimberley, WA) paintings express the landscape of his birth and ancestral lands, whilst teasing out the complexities of Gija world views and the impact of pastoral occupation. He employs striking monochromes and a gestural, rhythmical language of wet-on-wet colour graduations, on which more ornamental dot and jewel shapes are applied, alluding to landmarks, memories, and human presence. This pioneering, atmospheric depiction of his stunning, native Warlawoon gorge country has led to acclaimed recognition in the indigenous art world.
Ramsey has exhibited widely in Australia, and in group shows in the US, Paris and London. His work is held in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney and the Ian Potter Gallery, Melbourne. In 2013, Rammey was featured in Gija Manambarram Jimerawoon (Gija Senior Law People Forever) in an exhibition at the Australian Embassy in Paris. In 2015, he was a finalist in the 32nd Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards, and in 2017, his work from the Jirrawun era was featured in the Art Gallery of South Australia as part of the TARNANTHI Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art.

Kitty Napanangka Simon
Kitty Simon (b. 1948 Yuendumu NT, Australia) employs optic whites and an array of pastels to capture the feeling and colour of the desert flowers, and its natural features surrounding the salt plains of Mina Mina, a salt lake 600 kilometers to the south of Lajamanu. Mina Mina is a women’s dreaming site that is sacred for Warlpiri women of the Napangardi and Namanangka skin groups. It is the subject of many of Simon’s paintings. The dreaming describes a creation story in which women of all ages sing and dance day and night, bringing life to everything from rain clouds, waterholes to plant life and animals.

Jukuja Dolly Snell
Jukuja Dolly Snell (c.1935 – 2015, Kurtal, The Great Sandy Desert, Australia) was one of the artists that shaped the Aboriginal Art boom in the 1990’s. She featured in significant group shows such as the National Gallery of Victoria’s groundbreaking Images of Power in 1993. Her vibrant palette is masterfully layered with delicate detail and soft shapes that celebrate the iconic beauty of her country. Snell received the ultimate acknowledgement of her achievements when she was awarded the esteemed overall prize at the Telstra Art Awards in 2015. Kurtal is a jila (waterhole) associated with rainmaking, southwest of Lake Gregory in Western Australia.
Snell’s work was first shown in 1991 in Karrayili at Tandanya, Adelaide. She was part of the group of artists who painted the giant canvas Ngurrara II in 1997. Her first solo show was in Darwin in 2014 at the Outstation Gallery. Snell featured in the 2015 documentary Putuparri and the Rainmakers, which was directed by Nicole Ma. In it, her grandson Tom narrates the struggles of the people of the area to have their claim to their ancestral lands constituted.

Daniel Sturgis
Daniel Sturgis (b. 1966, London) is an artist and curator whose idiosyncratic, painterly language infuses formalism’s rigorous traditions of visual intellect and craftsmanship with contemporary pop references and casual aesthetics. His work proposes new possibilities for the continued relevance and vitality of painting and his off-beat geometric arrangements reinvest the optimistic and visionary qualities of modernism in contemporary compositions. Humorous, media savvy and hierarchically democratic, Sturgis’ works advance the legacy of 20th-century abstraction for 21st-century values and sensibilities.
Sturgis’ work is regularly exhibited in the UK and internationally, featuring at museums such as The Chinati Foundation (Marfa, Texas), Camden Art Centre (London) and Turner Contemporary (Margate).

John Walker
John Walker (b. 1939, Birmingham) is a celebrated abstract painter and printmaker. He represented Great Britain in the 1972 Venice Biennial and was nominated for 1985 Turner Prize. ‘The freedom with which he is working, and the edgy beauty he achieves as a result, give rise to a refreshing artistic experience of colour and graphic rhythms … Walker’s preoccupation with the natural world, and his place in it, is engaging in its essentialism – capturing light, space and tidal movement. He is turning paint into land, sea and sky on a coastline that beats to the sound of the Atlantic Ocean – a far cry from the industrial city where he was born and brought up’ – Ikon Gallery

Alice Wilson
Wilson (b. 1982, UK) works with plaster, construction timber, landscape, photography, and paint to realise ideas. Landscape is used in Wilson’s practice as a means to discuss concerns with experience, access and expectation. The work’s interrogation of how we negotiate landscape is as an allegory of our relationship to social, educational and political structures. From functional objects to towering abstract constructions, Wilson’s work attempts to acknowledge it’s situation and surroundings through form and sometimes also function.
Wilson is an Arts Council and British Council supported artist. She recently completed a residency and solo exhibition at Godsbanen, Denmark, and has exhibited at domobaal, Saatchi Gallery, London Art Fair and Wimbledon UAL. Wilson held her inaugural solo exhibition ‘ISLAND’ at JGM Gallery in the summer of 2019.

Courtesy of the artists and JGM Gallery, London