The Lowry Hotel Winter Exhibition
ANASTASIA BORODINA, REBECCA DAVY & MATTHEW SHUTT
Lowry Hotel, 50 Dearmans Place, Salford, Manchester, M3 5LH
Exhibition Dates: 21.11.24 - 21.01.25
The final exhibition of 2024 at the Lowry Hotel sees the works of three incredible artists brought together, each with their own take on realism within their art practice. Rebecca Davy's luscious Ginger Bread Houses sit next to Matthew Shutt's Action Figures, whilst Anastasia Borodina's exquisite gold Lindt Chocolate Bunnies and Teddy Bear gaze back at the viewer as they walk through the gallery. The works evoke childhood memories and better times gone by.
ANASTASIA BORODINA
Anastasia Borodina is a contemporary artist studying the transformation of traditional symbols of European culture in modern society through classical fine art techniques and mediums. Her subject of interest is always a person and their search for certain points of support in the form of rituals, signs, and visual forms adapting and confronting rapid changes in human society. She believes childhood is one of the key periods - when all patterns form, touching the base of our self-identity. Anastasia found many clues in the subconscious world of a young person's feelings and dreams.
"For my paintings, I deliberately select iconographic language as it is the only means I know powerful enough to communicate on such delicate and deeply hidden matters. I never just portray children but rather aspire to deliver in an indivisible artistic space all integrity and separation of the hidden internal world with the environment where a pure young person is located.
If successful, it makes the power of art explicit giving the viewer a unique opportunity to enter and relive their own childhood experience, contemplate or have a new intimacy of interaction with the magnificent world of children. Ultimately, it provides me and my viewers space for development and suggests new symbolic keys allowing better communication with a frightened but so exciting contemporary world streaming around us." Anastasia Borodina
Growing up in the North Caucasus, Anastasia Borodina graduated with honours from Ilya Rein's Academy of Arts in Saint-Petersburg, where she had learned from the best representatives of the Russian classical school of painting in the workshop of renowned artist Yuri Kalyuta.
Since 2019, Anastasia has been living and working in Manchester (UK), mastering her artistic vision and adapting the language of the classical school of painting to the contemporary artistic perception of the modern lifestyle and people. In 2024, she was elected associate member of the Manchester Academy of Fine Arts (AMAFA)
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.
Rebecca Davy is a Manchester-based artist. Since completing her MA in Fine Art in 2006, she has taken part in exhibitions abroad, and featured in exhibitions in London and Liverpool.
MATTHEW SHUTT
The predominant feature of toys, in particular action figures, as the main subject matter within Matthew Shutt's work lends its importance to a time in his life when he was younger, and life was simpler – something he tries to recreate now for a number of reasons. This uses forms of escapism both as a child, as he spent many a day adventuring in a world without limit, complexities, expectations and abrupt endings and also observed whilst watching his own children as they laugh and play with their own toys perceivably enjoying the same excitements and wonders as Matthew did too.
"Generally, I use a child’s vantage point as my compositional setting within my work to both represent the viewpoint I had on life when I was younger and also the viewpoint of my own children’s lives today. This allows many possible future genres and compositional styles as I can adapt my variations in execution within this philosophy, as I am not totally dependent on any one style. I can interweave the banal or the ordinary with undertones of cynicism, pastiche and irony akin to my eclectic outlook on life today. Recent mental health issues influence my artwork and allow a layered irony and subjective themes. The lack of a reality in my own mind is sometimes contrasted with the reality I try to execute within the aesthetics in my style of work." Matthew Shutt
A Fairytale of New York
These paintings are dedicated to urban life in and around New York City (and the US in general) at the time Matthew Shutt was born in the 1970s and growing up in the 80s and early 90s.
The work is about Matthew's perception of life when he was younger and the love and affection he had for everything New York City despite never going there. This perception of hope and a unique atmosphere influenced through film, television and music is observed through aged photographs in those eras but viewed in the present day with the objectivity of the real life situation back in time. Images of austerity and decay, grime, crime, graffiti and an excess in establishments offering adult entertainment, littered the streets of New York…. Yet all Matthew saw was freedom, expressionism, hope and inspiration.
"In my paintings I like to combine all aspects of reality and actual realism and objectivity of the original photograph but I strive to give them the atmosphere, excitement and different perception they would have had if I had viewed them as a child." Matthew Shutt
The exhibition is open daily from 10:00 - 22:00 and is on the first floor of the Lowry Hotel.
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
