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2 Herald St
E2 6JT
United Kingdom

+44 20 7168 2566

Contemporary art gallery in Bethnal Green, London. Representing artists Markus Amm, Alexandra Bircken, Josh Brand, Pablo Bronstein, Peter Coffin, Matt Connors, Matthew Darbyshire, Michael Dean, Ida Ekblad, Annette Kelm, Scott King, Cary Kwok, Christina Mackie, Djordje Ozbolt, Oliver Payne, Oliver Payne & Nick Relph, Amalia Pica, Nick Relph, Tony Swain, Donald Urquhart, Klaus Weber, and Nicole Wermers.

Lesley Vance

Herald St | 2 Herald St, E2 6JT

9th October - 19th November 2022

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For her exhibition at Herald St, Lesley Vance has made a suite of new paintings ranging from luminous watercolours to an immersive large-scale canvas with robust sweeping forms. The works are self-contained and their subjects centralised; as she puts it, they are ‘paintings of a thing’. They present crisp, vegetal patterns alongside sensuous and bodily outlines, and areas of flat colour which collide with striations redolent of the spines of a shell or the fur of an animal. One painting depicts fleshy, embryonic bulbs enveloped and connected through a network of grey ribbon, another covers lounging aubergine passages with shredded leafy layers.

Untitled

2022

Watercolour on paper

66 x 50.8 cm / 26 x 20 in, unframed

70.5 x 55.3 x 3.2 cm / 27.8 x 21.8 x 1.3 in, framed

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Untitled

2022

Watercolour on paper

66 x 50.8 cm / 26 x 20 in, unframed

70.5 x 55.3 x 3.2 cm / 27.8 x 21.8 x 1.3 in, framed

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Untitled

2022

Oil on linen

203.2 x 170.2 x 3.8 cm / 80 x 67 x 1.5 in

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While no two paintings ever begin the same way, Vance always starts with a concrete subject which remains unknown to the viewer. Studying the marbled and meandering pools of colour remaining at this stage, the artist guides the painting into being, steadily adding definition to her initial burst of gesture and working at a pace to crystallise the composition while the oil is wet enough to manipulate. Upending the traditional speeds inherent to each medium, Vance is able to linger over her watercolours, using a less absorbent ground which allows the liquid to sit atop it for longer. Time endures in her paintings, as if she has paused them; as the artist states, ‘They had a life before, and they’ll have a life after.’

Untitled

2022

Oil on linen

48.3 x 58.4 x 2.5 cm / 19 x 23 x 1 in

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When conceiving the present body of work, Vance kept returning to the idea of circulation: ‘I don’t let you out of the painting, everything comes back into the painting’. She compares her compositions to the Mobius strip or Klein bottle, topological phenomena with no distinct boundaries, beginnings, or ends. The artist works in opposites, building volume into a two-dimensional surface and confounding layers of painterly swirls and flat planes with shadows. Her paintings emanate from her process; action and movement are entangled in the final, still image. The artist enfolds these playful tensions into her work, resulting in windows of quiet visual drama.

Untitled

2022

Oil on linen

91.4 x 71.1 x 2.5 cm / 36 x 28 x 1 in

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Vance’s touchstones range from the clamouring colours of Elizabeth Murray and the otherworldly vegetation imagined by Anna Zemánkova to Georgia O’Keeffe’s series of pelvis bones. Like O’Keeffe’s bones or Zemánková’s flowers, Vance’s work embraces the mystical perfection of nature, as encapsulated in the helical chambers of a shell tossed in the ocean until it achieves exact symmetry or in the precision of a flower petal’s geometry. Singular and contained, and pulsating through time and movement, Vance’s paintings team with life and energy.

Text by Émilie Streiff

Untitled

2022

Oil on linen

48.3 x 58.4 x 2.5 cm / 19 x 23 x 1 in

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