DREAMIN’ WILD

Curated by Stevie Dix & Thom Trojanowski

November 24^th 2018 – January 13^th 2019

HOLLY HENDRY

Born 1998 in Stockholm, Sweden.
BFA, Bergen National Academy of the Arts, Bergen, Norway
2-year diploma, Pernby School of Painting, Stockholm, Sweden.

Holly Hendry reinvigorates what is the essence of sculpture: manipulating material. She uses shapes from every-day, often industrial objects and inflates them in a different material and sugary-sweet pastel colours amplifying their visual and tactile appeal and emphasizing a childlike experimental play. She explores the boundaries of the material to then break them in every thinkable direction as if everything were made of plasticine, turning everything upside down. What was hard becomes soft, what appears to be soft is made of concrete. She pushes and pulls and cuts the material to the point of extreme tactility or solidified movement. We rediscover with her, the joy of manipulating matter.

JON PILKINGTON

Born 1990 in Liverpool, GB. Lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark.
MA of Fine Arts, Chelsea College of Art & Design, London, UK.
Gilbertson Excellence Scholarship, University of Central Lancashire, Lancashire, UK.
BA of Fine Art, University of Lancashire, Lancashire, UK.

Pilkington’s paintings are dense and intricate: layers on layers and shapes on shapes in unfinished rough brushstrokes render the works to an almost illegible perspective. A few sharp boundaries separate different scenes making the whole appear to be a sort of collage of different cut-up paintings that were painted on different times. A small trespass here and there proves the opposite however and emphasizes the merger of the new and the old which is a constant throughout his work. In his newest paintings old-fashioned porcelain figurines take the lead in an untraceable story, reducing them to the traces of an elusive past.

JUSTIN WILLIAMS

Born 1985 in Melbourne, Australia. Lives and works in Victoria, Australia.
Swinburn University, Hawthorn, Australia.

Justin Williams explores his own form of outsider art. He is inspired by the place where he grew up in Sassafras, Australia where he was confronted with individuals and communities living on the edge of society where folkloric traditions, mysticism, mythology, superstition… give meaning to life and are, unbound to societal conventions, expressed artistically. This ‘living outside of society’ left a deep impression on the artist and is expressed in his own artistic practice by the fearless renunciation of our western aesthetic standards and traditions to allow for a boundless exploration of styles and techniques, and so he too experiences a bit of ‘the outside’.

FAYE WEI WEI

Born 1994 in London, UK. Lives and works in London, UK.
BA Slade School of Fine Art (Hons), UCL, London, UK.

Faye Wei Wei’s paintings exude, above all, an unapologetic romanticism. The feminine, dreamy images are delicately though spontaneously put on canvas in transparent earth- and pastel-tones in a sketch-like manner. A melancholic, sweet, poetic scene functioning as a love letter to the friends and loved ones in her life. Fairytale-esque elements and mythological appearing symbols constitute the parts of inter-human connections and stories in which child-like naivete is put up on a pedestal.

MALIN GABRIELLA NORDIN

Born 1988 in Stockholm, Sweden.
BFA, Bergen National Academy of the Arts, Bergen, Norway.
2-year diploma, Pernby School of Painting, Stockholm, Sweden.

Nordin’s oeuvre mainly consists of brightly coloured paintings, collages and sculptures of flower – and plant-like shapes, often zoomed-in to abstraction, but always improvised out of the unconscious memory. Nature is her most important source for inspiration which she translates into radiant colour compositions which, despite a high level of abstraction always exude a great level of mystique. In some of her works she includes human figures where she always translates the human-nature connection in a very explicit symbiotic way. She works very playful and intuitively and tends to paint straight onto the canvases, exposing the bare linen here and there. She never allows herself to become too comfortable in the atelier, as soon as she knows how to do something, has mastered it, she abandons it in the search for a new boundary to break: a new way of making and looking.

THOM TROJANOWSKI

Born 1988 in Kidderminster, UK. Lives and works in London, UK.
BA Fine Art Painting, Wimbledon College of Arts, London, UK.

The works of Thom Trojanowski are incredibly dynamic and versatile. He plays with different styles and references to art history, comic book elements, graffiti… which he unflinchingly combines into one image. He also experiments with materials in such a free way that the boundary between sculpture and painting becomes very hard to find. Paint that looks like clay, 3D collages, a painting as an accent in a sculpture or an entire spatial installation… everything is possible. It can surely not be denied that his works are bursting with energy. It almost looks like an ode to everything that has inspired or surprised him throughout his life, but especially to the boundless possibilities of artistry.

STEVIE DIX

Born 1990 in Genk, Belgium. Lives and works in London, UK.
Autodidact.

Stevie Dix is a self-taught artist. This is expressed mostly in a visible exploration of the paint. Rejecting a formal education hasn’t stood in her way, on the contrary. Her works are proof of a laborious practical experience which results in a very authentic, distinctive style. Oil paint is put on the canvas in thick, 3D layers and manipulated by hand like a child would, making the whole very appealing in its plasticity. She lets the moment, the size of the canvas and the composition determine how the painting will turn out and uses what seem like random but often also reoccurring objects and abstract shapes to create a quite personal, symbolic scene.