30 X 30: Prêt-à-porter - Anya Pesce & Lisa Sharp exhibition

#91 I Août 2019

Galerie

ABSTRACT PROJECT Lieu de création, de réflexion et de diffusion

Anya Pesce & Lisa Sharp

14 août – 31 août 2019

Sous la direction d’Olivier Di Pizio, Jean-Pierre Bertozzi, Bogumila Strojna

5, rue des immeubles industriels 75011 Paris contact@abstract-project.com www.abstract-project.com

30 x 30 : prêt-à-porter

Anya Pesce and Lisa Sharp are painters who first met at art school in Sydney, Australia.

Sharing a lively interest in the fields of non-objective abstraction, expanded painting and materials discourse they have enjoyed discussing, working and showing together in various artist-run platforms, projects and exhibitions.

The exhibition 30 x 30: prêt-à-porter presents their most recent works, posited as a visual and ongoing conversation between their distinct art practices and shared fascination with cloth and clothing. Starting with the logical clarity of a monochrome square, humbly sized at 30 x 30 cm, remaining ever conscious of art historical legacies, they have both made works that play with strictures as well as posing possibilities.

Like their ongoing dialogue, the exhibition spars back and forth on the potential of black squares, shades of white and associations of red, yellow and blue.

Where Anya works with readymade colour and materially challenges notions of the painted picture plane, Lisa works with single pigments and repurposed cloth as surrogate canvas. Industrial fabrication is played off against hand making. Fashion and consumerism with utility and everyday ritual. Glossy and manipulated surfaces beside stained and wrinkled skins. In common is the visual language of painting and the schema of geometric abstraction, as a way to explore narratives of body, drapery and the cultural significance of textiles.

Lives and works in Sydney

 Small Red Fold Hand moulded polymethyl methacrylate 30 x 30 x 7 cm 2019

Anya Pesce

‘Surface’ is fundamental to my practice as it is the external material skin that captures the essence of what I make. Historically ‘Finish Fetish’ in contemporary practice contextualises my work with reference to a specific group of artists in Los Angeles, USA in the 1960s who made work by hand that appeared slick and machine made.

Mimicking fabric and referencing the body, the forms become a fusion of visual and experienced phenomena. My chosen material is polymethyl methacrylate-acrylic, which I mold by hand to create three-dimensional pieces that deceptively appear as soft folds and drapes, but are solid. Transforming the industrial material from its rectilinear state, the gestural forms appear to conceal or reveal something intangible under the brilliant lustre and colour of the exterior.

 Small Yellow Fold Hand moulded polymethyl methacrylate 30 x 15 x 5 cm 2019

Small Blue Scrunch  Hand moulded polymethyl methacrylate 15 x 15 x 10 cm 2019

Lives and works between Tokyo and Sydney

 Cinnabar Red Square Pigment in acrylic on tea-stained muslin teabags on linen 30 x 30 x 10 cm 2019

Lisa Sharp

‘Painting’ is action, object and ongoing historical discourse, all at once. My practice explores the ways in which the form of painting can express that conflation. With a playful and materially reductive approach, I situate my work in the gap between expanded and contracted painting.

For the 30 x 30 series, I combine repurposed domestic textiles, stitching and repair, single pigment paints and readymade 30 x 30 cm standard art shop supports. The resulting works reflect a search for meaning and metaphor within the material conventions of painting. As the usual elements and processes are reduced, replaced, circumvented or inverted, so do questions arise about what it is to have support, to wear a surface and to be in a body.

 Chalk Yellow Square Pigment in tempera on used oshibori on linen 30 x 30 x 5 cm 2019

Indigo Blues Square  Indigo-dyed cloth in acrylic on linen 30 x 30 x 5 cm 2019

© Abstract Project 5, rue des immeubles industriels 75011 Paris contact@abstract-project.com Édition Abstract Project Création Delnau

AP