7 Artists from Royal College of Art in London
L.L. Contemporary is pleased to announce the group exhibition "Both, Inwards and Out There," featuring 29 works by seven postgraduate artists from the Royal College of Art in London.
These pieces explore the fluid boundaries of painting, blending subjective perception with abstract sensations, ranging from playful observations to personal reflections. This exhibition marks Jan Valik's third showcase at the gallery, while the other artists are making their debut. The gallery is very thrilled to introduce these emerging artists to North American audiences.
Feeling and intuition serve as a fundamental yet deeply real basis for these artists' exploration in painting. Their approaches are shaped by a careful focus on the formal aspects of painting and a thoughtful examination of their personal connections to the world. At the intersection of what is sensed and felt and how these experiences are communicated, the formless and intangible begin to take shape, resulting in the emergence of patterns and structures. Regardless of whether figurative or leaning towards abstraction, these works simultaneously display and conceal in balance of both directions - within and out there: transforming one’s subjectivity with an urge or calling to formulate these sensations accurately and with honest dedication to their perceived nature.
Works on display are visually layered evidence of artists’ respective search(es), individual explorations and dialogues between their own existence and the experiences which shaped them.
While gentle variations of watercolors by Felicity Nutt and playfully colored oils of Toby Rainbird are formulated through patterns, repetition and rhythm, they also talk about balance and subtleties of perception in the same measure as brushwork, precise composition and subtle humor of works by Beth Cowey and Tobias Francis. Personal or ephemeral encounters are source for both, Soryun Ahn and Yiwen Liu, resulting in Ahn’s atmospheric narrations and ephemerally organic abstraction of Liu’s paintings. And similarly, through fluctuating tensions and evocation of otherness Jan Valik’s paintings oscillate back and forth from autonomous to conjured spaces. Works of all these artists are sensitive responses to the lived complexities, in essence ungraspable and fleeting. Incomprehensible but real, incomprehensible but existing, standing right before one's (half opened, half closed) eyes.
Painting then is the other time made visible and simultaneously hidden. Both, inwards and out there.
There is no admission fee to the gallery. All are welcome.
About the Artists
Beth Cowey
Beth Cowey, a Scottish born artist from Glasgow, works with an experimental and personal exploration in painting, print, collage and sculptural processes. She is a thinker in visual relationships to form between works through surface, edge and color. Together, her works speak to questions of structure, fragment, material encoding and play, and a rhetorical, a-parallel logic that exists between them.
Beth Cowey received her BA in Painting and Printmaking at Glasgow School of Art and her MA in Painting at Royal College of Art in London. She is a recipient of The Glasgow School of Art Landscape Drawing Award (2018) and Clyde Hopkins Mentoring Award (2024) and was recently shortlisted for Valerie Beston Award and Valerie Beston Award (both 2024). Her works were exhibited across the UK and in Sweden.
Felicity Nutt
Painter Felicity Nutt creates complexity and nuance with the simplest of tools, namely line and color in grid formation. Her inquiry into spacing of line, and order or combination of colours uncovers how does material impact what we see and what happens when one sees these differences laid out, side by side, or on top of one another. Nuances of colors in delicate materials, such as watercolor paint and colored pencil, that are receptive to the softest touch, and sit lightly on the surface allow her to layer up line and color incrementally and slowly. Resulting complex, shifting, and transitioning surfaces play with optics and investigate the nuances that perhaps get missed in our day to day, fast paced lives.
A Welsh artist Felicity Nutt has received her BA from Aberystwyth University in Wales followed by her MA studies at the Royall College of Art in London. Her most recent show was held at Fitzrovia Gallery in London earlier this year.
Jan Valik
Jan Valik approaches and considers his paintings as fluid and psychological territories moving between perceptual ambiguities, emotions and evocations of otherness. Held in a strange balance and uncertain of fixed meanings, these works are indirect or fragmented responses to the world in flux of contradictions in an effort to bypass the subjective to flirt with something universal. Coded in washes of color, impulsive brushstrokes or slowly traced shapes, his interest lies in where the external space affects the internal one and paint from where that intersection is.
Jan Valik, born in Slovakia and based in London, studied at Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and at the Royal College of Arts in London. A recipient of The Vice Chancellor’s Achievement Scholarship, he was previously awarded a VUB Foundation Painting Prize in Slovakia, and recently he was shortlisted for Contemporary British Painting Prize 2021 and The Morrison and Foerster Art Prize 2023 in London. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions in Canada, Belgium, Austria, Slovakia, Czechia and Japan, as well as in group exhibitions in the UK and across Europe, as well as in China and Japan.
Soryun Ahn
Works of a Korean born painter Soryun Ahn are grounded in their inner fictionality in which she captures the reality she encounters. The paintings reveal points where ancient narratives - akin to myths - intersect with personal imagination, re-emerging as contemporary reality. Within her paintings Soryun constructs new narratives intimate and autobiographical imagery and enigmatic figures constantly struggling to define their existence. The image of death as well as the ironies and mysteries that we encounter in daily life explore the internal world that lies behind what initially appears
Prior to her studies at the Royal College of Art in London, Soryun Ahn studied at Korea National University of Arts in Seoul and was a resident student at Braunschweig University of Art (HBK) in Germany. Her work has been consistently shown in more than a dozen group shows in Seoul and recently in London as well.
Tobias Francis
Paintings of Tobias Francis are often small-scale and uniform in size. This is a deliberate choice for a conscious approach to limitation which paradoxically liberate and allow him to play with compositional trickery and visual artifice, creating a space where wordplay and paint are lyrically employed. His works can be seen as puzzles to which he in his own words adds: “When I paint, I reconcile both the trickster and straight shooter in me. I’m drawn to the slipperiness of paint (like language) to elucidate and veil, and question how withholding information can inform more, not less”.
Tobias Francis got his BA in Painting from Edinburgh College of Art with a recognition of Outstanding Achievement in Art Award and subsequently his MA from the Royal College of Art in London. He exhibited in group shows across the UK: in London, Edinburgh, Sheffield, Exeter and more.
Toby Rainbird
Practice of British born painter Toby Rainbird is an act of free-spirited, yet self-aware and conscious play centered around forms of demarcation and repetition found in commonplace yet peripheral spaces. Allowing the work to unfold through trial and error rather than following a premeditated trajectory, his works engage with the potential of significant forms while maintain a deliberate distance from direct or heavily symbolic gestures. Each piece is an accumulation of encounters becoming a reconfiguration of tangible articles and a conscious material experience.
Toby Rainbird received his BA from Bath School of Art and Design and his MA from Royal College of Art in London. Apart from numerous exhibitions in London and around the UK, his paintings were shown at Youkobo Art Space in Tokyo as well as in Berlin. He is also active as an artist-curator with his latest curatorial project titled Caper in London.
Yiwen Liu
Fluid abstractions of Yiwen Liu explore ephemeral and fleeting moments and encounters with an introspective approach to subjectivity of her recollections. Whether people, places or nature, the organic shapes flow in subtle compositions where the enigmatic correlates with the personal and color functions and melts into a state between emotion and atmosphere, memories and presence.
Yiwen Liu is a graduate from Central Saint Martins and currently Royal College of Art in London. Her work in has been shown in group exhibitions in the UK, notably at Southwark Park Gallery, London and in upcoming BEEP Painting Biennial in Wales (2024).
For more information please contact the gallery's director Sophie Lu 905-771-0928 [email protected]
Summer Hours: Thursday, Friday, Sunday: 1-5pm
