COME SEE COMME CA - Art Gallery - EXHIBITION #001 / 2022

HOPE MILL | 113 POLLARD STREET| M4 7JA | EX DATES: 18.02.22 - 04.04.22

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We are longing for brighter days and the hint of Spring so to hurry the seasons on we have curated a fresh and uplifting exhibition in the Comme Ca Art Gallery.

 

With a passion for creating high end artworks at affordable prices, this group of artists are producing some of the most exciting art currently being created in Manchester. Each artist has their own unique style and whilst they stand apart from each other they also compliment each other, creating a vision of beauty, colour and light throughout the gallery. 

 

For more information on the artworks in exhibition, please contact Claire Turner, Gallery Director.

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ALAN YAFFE

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Alan’s paintings have already started  to cause a stir in the Comme Ca Art Gallery, before we had even exhibited his artworks. This is the exact reaction we had when Alan brought his paintings to the gallery.

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When Alan takes hold of a blank canvas, there’s an excitement that’s hard to explain. The creative possibilities are infinite and, for Alan, abstraction offers up all those possibilities.

 

HIs creativity is not bound by the real world and, quite often, not even by his imagination. Sometimes he paints in a planned manner, knowing, at the start, what will or won’t work. But often, he doesn’t begin with a clear idea. The beauty of applying paint to canvas is that Alan is able to let the image develop as he builds up the composition with layers, texture and colour until arriving at an end point… a finished painting. That end point often takes Alan by surprise in an amazing & uplifting way.

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BIG H - HENRY CHAN

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Henry's art is mainly a mixture of graffiti and pop art with popular culture often his subject matter and his art often satirising current issues in society such as celebrity culture, power and commercialism.

With his art Henry wants to arouse the senses and stir the spirit and wants his art to visually stimulate the observer through strong images, colour, patterns and words.

Henry often enjoys the look and feel of tight and accurate geometric lines mixed with strong vibrant colours and bold patterns often surrounding a central figure from the world of popular culture.

 

PHIL CONSTABLE

 

Artist and printmaker Phil Constable works by layering images via screen print, utilising half-tone photography, symbols, mark making with gold and silver gilding on various surfaces including paper, board, and glass.

 

Documenting industrial sites and spaces, often focusing on trace images created by construction markings and/or graffiti that has often been covered or ‘painted out’ poorly. Phil finds these images and incorporates them as part of a readymade dialogue between the mediums of the mechanically reproduced image and the brush.

 

Multi-layered imagery encourages the viewer to visually explore the surface, the texture, and depth within the work echoing time and memory.

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REBECCA DAVY

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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.

 

JAMIE JONES

 

Jamie Jones is an 80's kid who obsessed over cartoons, toys, skateboarding and hip-hop - you'll probably see that in his work.

 

Jamie has been inspired by countless artists all his life, but his real love of art is nostalgic references - building on the familiar and creating something new.

 

Street art and pop art are big influences, but he has always been fascinated with anatomical illustrations and their incredible details. Looking under the skin gives a surreal insight in to what’s hidden beneath, and this has been a focal point for Jamie’s recent work.

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JO MANBY

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Jo Manby paints imaginary scenes in which flowering plants blossom across subtle, shimmering backgrounds, where birds and butterflies alight on twisting stems and branches. Wild and cultivated flowers are captured in a refined delineation.

 

Different emulsions are used to develop chalky or satiny coloured grounds for intricate paintings inspired in part by nature writing and a renewed interest in noticing the small environmental details all around us. British hedgerow wildflowers and birds like chaffinches and jays are often overlooked or taken for granted, but they have a miraculous beauty of their own. Brought up in the countryside, Jo aims to revisit and celebrate this magical quality in her work. 

 

In her other current paintings, she looks further afield, for example the Eastern bluebirds in cherry blossom or the bewitching Long-tailed Paradise Whydahs in an African desert rose tree. Jo is influenced by the historic chinoiserie style that conflates Chinese and British design, particularly its ornamental flowering trees, intricate curvilinear and arabesque forms and layering of subtle but intense colour.

 

Jo’s hand-painted Wild Rose Screens are an example of how her work fits well into a fashionable interior. Undertaking commissions for mural painting in domestic or commercial settings, and for bespoke items such as multi-panelled screens, the decorative aspects of her approach to painting, inspired by nature, are foregrounded.

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SOPHIE NIXON

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Sophie Nixon's paintings are inspired by her life, the conflict between her busy career and social life in Manchester and the slower pace of the time she gets to paint and travel around Europe, especially Italy where her father lives. These two sides to her are played out in the dramatically different styles of painting; vivid representations of the buildings and people that form her city scapes, capturing the essence of the sulphuric lights and blurred visions of a Manchester night to the sublimely calm, bright sunlight casting shadows on a lone building or figure. 

 

Sophie works from life, spending time drawing and photographing the scene she will paint and prefers the medium of oil paint.

 

Whilst drawing on her life, Sophie is also inspired by other painters, primarily the works of Hopper, Lowry and Rothko and has been more recently introduced to the work of Jock McFadyen and Ben McLaughlin.

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EMILY SEVILLE

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Emily Seville is a visual artist and maker working predominantly in ceramics and watercolour painting. Her work is concerned with our relationship with and connection to the natural world, often focusing on our intrinsic link to the land and the mark we are making upon it. 

 

Emily seeks to find connections to the Earth through her artistic processes. All of her ceramic pieces are hand-built, expressing the tactile nature of clay and the presence of the artist. The incorporation of natural elements, such as leaves, within her process allows her to reference both form and texture through the materiality of her mediums. 

 

Her recent watercolour pieces are inspired by research into the positive impact natural patterns can have on mental wellbeing. Referencing the mandala form within her paintings, she uses repetition of pattern to create visual soothing paintings. Emily’s painting technique allows her to emphasise the materiality of the watercolour, drawing out the tones to create forms that are soft-focused while still having dimension.

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JACQUI SYMONS

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Created from a desire to be more environmentally-aware, buy and consume fewer products and generate less waste, Jacqui Symons began exploring natural colour and dyes in 2018. She researched and developed the use of plant-based pigments for oil-based printmaking inks and from there expanded into making her own watercolours, pastels, inks, screenprinting pastes and dry powdered pigments from plant sources.

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STEFANIE TROW

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Intense bold colours are pulled and scraped across the canvas, creating an expressive language of their own. Trow’s brushwork gives way to movement. The paint just about holds onto the image, creating an ebb and flow of realism, taken away from us sometimes by abstraction.  Like trying to grasp a memory, parts of the paintings remain vivid, whilst others drip and slide away from us, pooling into a new reality, ready for the viewer to unearth. 

 

Stefanie’s work belongs in numerous private collections, exhibiting across the UK at prestigious galleries such as the Albemarle Gallery, London, Saul Hay Gallery and Comme Ca Gallery, Manchester. She has featured in Baaba Maal’s music video “Gilli Men” and a Boehringer Ingelheim TV advert. Most recently she has been selected for the ING Discerning Eye exhibition at Mall Galleries and elected as an associate member of MAFA (Manchester Academy of Fine Arts). 

 

JACQUELINE TAYLOR

 

Jacqueline Taylor is from Manchester in the UK, where she still works and lives today. Taylor is an emerging artist whose main medium is oil paint. She is a painter who’s interested in realism. Taylor’s work is based around the everyday and leaves the observer of her paintings to decide the narrative of the scenes or people she depicts. She desires to make artwork that creates a feeling within and can be viewed many times over while feeling new each time it is observed. 

 

An example of this is in the painting Woman With Whippet (February 2020) where Taylor took a solitary subject and presented her in a room to be viewed, and for the spectator to catch a glimpse of what could be themselves in the mirror within the space. The reasoning behind why the woman is there, who is gazing at her and her emotional state can be reimagined many times over with a new narrative possible each time. 

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HANNAH WOOLL

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Hannah Wooll’s work has always been concerned with imagery that is slightly off kilter, exaggerated or fabricated. The portraits of women who at first glance are beautiful and uncomplicated then reveal themselves to be anything but, subverted from the magazine pages and old master paintings from which their heritage derives; laying sloth like in dead winter trees which belong in Technicolor film sets, or starkly lit in deliberately contrived and manufactured environments which are oddly dreamlike. 

 

More recently her paintings have been inspired by uncanny museum painted dioramas, figures strategically lit by phosphorescent fish tanks, and reflections in glazed paintings; portraits within portraits, gaze upon gaze. The paint itself is as powerful an enticement as the carefully chosen imagery; a slippery, fallible, distortive tool, rendering limbs and features clumsy and unreal, existing to be just a painted mark, which in itself lends a surreal layer of reference.

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PLEASE CONTACT COMME CA ART DEALERS FOR ANY ENQUIRIES. 

 

CLAIRE TURNER | claire@commecaart.com | T: +44 (0) 161 273 5495

 

CCA GALLERY 5TH FLOOR | HOPE MILL | POLLARD STREET | ANCOATS | MANCHESTER | M4 7JA

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