15YR LOWRY HOTEL ANNIVERSARY EXHIBITION

 

As the Lowry Hotel celebrates it’s 15 Year Anniversary, Comme Ca Art join in the celebrations with an exhibition showcasing the cream of the crop of artists who have exhibited at the hotel over the years. 

 

The Lowry Hotel first contacted Comme Ca Art to work in collaboration with Cow Parade, an organisation who worked with local artists on a city wide exhibition of Cows painted by local artists with the proceeds going to the Manchester Kids Charity. Comme Ca Art selected a number of local artists who were taking part in Cow Parade to exhibit at the Lowry Hotel. This gave visitors a chance to see the works of local artists before, during and after the Cow Parade event. 

 

Since then, Comme Ca Art has clocked up almost 100 exhibitions at the Lowry Hotel. All of the exhibitions have included artists who have an affiliation with the city; whether it be they studied here, grew up here or moved to the city for work. This has made the Lowry Hotel Gallery one of the most successful galleries in Manchester for promoting home grown talent. 

 

Not only that, The Lowry Hotel can boast to be the only 24-hour Gallery in the city, so if you find yourself unable to sleep, you can always bob down to the hotel to check out the latest exhibition. It beats wondering around the supermarket in the wee small hours! 

 

Having showcased 100’s of artists from the Lowry Hotel’s First Floor Gallery, selecting for this exhibition was no mean feat so we decided to ask the Comme Ca collectors who they would like to see back at the hotel. Here’s who they selected:

 

SUSAN AGGARWAL

Enthused by nature and her passion for creativity, Susan loves to explore wonderful colours and textures with an abundant sense of freedom. Her collection of expressive work is a very personal representation of the artist's very own experience of life, beauty, the natural world and her artistic response to it. 

 

REBECCA DAVY

Rebecca Davy’s primary concern when creating her artworks is the act of painting itself. Her focus is on what she describes as “the seductiveness and sensuousness of pushing paint on canvas”. She is particularly attracted to painting the colourful, the ephemeral and the kitsch, constructing paintings with a strong element of light and colour that satisfies both the subject and its medium.

For her, sticky and colourful things such as sweets and icing are good subjects for the visceral qualities of paint. Bringing these two elements together produces a new realm between kitsch and the hyper real, paintings that flow into being from the artist’s imagination.

 

LITTLE ARTISTS

The Little Artists' work explores the iconic, as they draw on figures and events in recent art history in an attempt to understand the significance of art and the culture that creates it. Their use of playful and irreverent materials makes their work accessible and enjoyable, but is also intended to explore more complex issues.

The Little Artists attempt to make clear the status of artist as brand and artwork as merchandise, investigating complex issues of process, identity, authorship, branding, and art’s relationship to consumerism.

 

ANDREW MAGEE

Andrew Magee’s practice incorporates a number of techniques including painting, printmaking, photography and drawing.

He creates beautiful work that at once confronts and inspires the viewer by combining classicism and occult and esoteric imagery. His recent screen prints examine relationships between light and dark, revealing and hiding areas through successive layers of ink through silkscreens to highlight or obscure elements. He has developed glazing techniques to fully explore the possibilities of depth in printmaking and to create unique and desirable artworks and images. 

 

CHRISTOPHER RAINHAM

Christopher Rainham’s work has always been inspired by the natural world and more specifically his experience of the natural world. He is inspired by the way flora and fauna is woven into language, the explanations of things, stories and beliefs.

Rainham loves the material qualities of paint, what it does, how it feels, smells, how in painting and drawing materials change and adapt, try and become something else in becoming a painting.

 

SIMON TAYLOR

Simon Taylor’s photoreal paintings transcend not only photography but painting itself. Just as in a film, where subtle changes in narrative can be indicated by moving the focus of the camera, Simon directs the viewer’s eye to a sheer line of focus down the centre of the main subject in his latest work. Everything around it shimmers in a pictorial hinterland of peripheral vision. The surfaces are miraculous, smooth; they look as if the image has been projected onto the canvas; there is no evidence of a worked surface, even on very close examination.

A combination of delicate airbrushing and fine brushes are used to conjure into existence an image captured with a macro lens and a short depth of field that instantly blurs everything beyond that focus. A story can be told by manipulating where the focus is placed in the picture. Between film, where a viewer spends time with a character, following them in and out of consecutive scenes, and photography, where the viewer has no relationship with the image but only views it and walks by, Simon’s paintings, as he puts it “spend time with the viewer”.

 

STEFANIE TROW

Stefanie has always been fascinated with the human form and portraiture. She uses her paintings as a way of interpreting her surroundings, relationships, thoughts and feelings. Her paintings specifically focus on the female form through the exploration of colour and mark making. 

The paintings are built up using intuitive brush strokes, layering one on top of the other, creating a rich language. Stefanie wants the viewer to be intrigued, to draw them closer to the details of the work, discovering the layers of brush strokes that have been built up to create each piece. This creates a painting that up close can be seen in a semi abstract way but from afar remains realistic, enticing the viewer to interact and re-examine what they see in front of them.

 

ROBERT WALKER

Robert has been a professional photographer since 1980.

His commercial clients have included Olympus, Mercedes, Reebok and The Royal Mail, producing a set of stamps to celebrate British Cinema. 

He was also one of Take That’s official photographers.

 

In 2007 he decided to concentrate purely on personal work, and has since been developing his understated observational style. 

Being freed from the confines of the commercial studio has given him the time to be curious and to find beauty in the most unlikely places.

His work has been shown in New York, Florence and Manchester as well the Saatchi Gallery in London.

A career highlight was having pieces selected for the permanent collection of The National Portrait Gallery in 2012.

 

And of course, all of the artworks are for sale! 

Please call the CCA Gallery on 0161 273 5495 for any sales enquiries, thank you.

 

Claire Turner

CCA Founder

The Lowry Hotel 

50 Dearmans Place | Salford | Manchester | M3 5LH

The exhibition continues until 31st May 2016