Halcyon Gallery now represent British female artist Graceland unveiling the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery: Spotlight on the Shadows.
The immersive show presents an expansive survey of 30 artworks created over the last two years, her works providing a unique opportunity to explore the full scope of her vibrant, nuanced, dark and playful sensibility.
The gallery space at 29 New Bond Street has been transformed by the curatorial team and Graceland into an immersive space, reinforcing the potency of her intoxicating worlds with 3-dimensional installations that recreate her visual inventions across the gallery-including a near-life-size polar bear and giant chess pieces.
Through the alternative reality that Graceland London creates, she shines a spotlight on the challenges of 21st-century life with the use of symbols and iconography, derived from both art history and contemporary culture. Her art addresses mental health, addiction, conspiracy theories, conspicuous consumption and commercialism, and many of the other themes that characterise our time, with an equal measure of pessimism and humour.
Graceland London’s brave use of bold and bright colours in her artwork provides an iron fist in a velvet glove, the colour in her work juxtaposed by the darker themes she is exploring. Graceland London’s training in 3D animation and design has significantly informed her practice. It has led her to invent an array of unique characters and motifs that are a part of her distinctive visual language. The universe that she creates beyond the picture surface is conceived through candy colours and playful articulations of form.
The artist also has a background in art history and her fascination with the Old Masters has had a major impact on her work. Her paintings repeatedly reference art historical traditions, and she completes many of her motifs with oil painting techniques that recall Northern European 15th-century paintings by the likes of Jan van Eyck and Hieronymus Bosch. However, she also reimagines and repurposes tradition to address contemporary themes. A recurring motif throughout her work is the fried egg serving as a spin on the traditional symbolism of the egg in art as visual shorthand for new life. As the egg is fried its potential is tainted: all new life is subject to ending up with vices because of its environment.
Graceland Spotlight on the Shadows – October 6th, Halcyon Gallery, 29 New Bond Street
