A SPACE TO HOLD THE GAZE: Group show: Anne Carney Raines, Ben Walker, Bianca Maccall, Gareth Cadwallader, Gethin Evans, Julie Caves, Marc Prats, Tomas Harker, Willian GC Brown

18 June - 11 July 2021

Liliya Art Gallery is pleased to present its first group exhibition ‘A Space to Hold the Gaze’. The exhibition presents a new series of work by nine artists who subtly draw influence from photographs and moving image. The work exhibited offers an intriguing insight into the interplay between imaginary pictorial surface and materiality.

 

In his book “Ubiquitous Photography”, Martin Hand explores the rise and circulation of digital photography examining how this has transformed the landscape of visual communication and culture. In a world that seemingly hinges on visual saturation how does painting infer a new set of associations and meanings to re-ground the transience of digital images into real life material substance? Through the assimilation of images, lived experience and encounters with the increasingly digital world, each artist presents a unique narrative and perspective by translating memory and image into their own pictorial language. 

 

When the ‘image’ has the potential for fallibility and falseness, what does painting allow that the digital image doesn’t? What window of solace does it offer as an alternative space to hold the gaze in this fast pace endless stream of content? As the museums and galleries reopen and we encounter art again in the flesh perhaps we can look to painting as a site of contemplation and with a slowness and deliberateness in a world that is endlessly fighting for our attention.