Cadogan Contemporary

ABSTRACT.30TH March - 17TH April 2010

Gallery hours:Monday - Saturday 10am - 6pm

Or by Appointment

Cadogan Contemporary87 Old Brompton Road

LondonSW7 3LD

Tel: +44 (0)20 7581 5451info@cadogancontemporary.comwww.cadogancontemporary.com

[COVER] Deborah Tarr, CenTRAL Avenue,150 x 150 cm / 59” x 59”

exhibiting Artists:

Joost Beerents

Bridget Leaman

Jim Whitty

Deborah Tarr

Kate Hunt

Anthony Bryant

Andrew Johnstone

Philip Mount

Maria Luisa Hernandez

More paintings from each of these artists can be seen at www.cadogancontemporary.com

Joost Beerents

The Dutch artist Joost Beerents, born in 1963, has been exhibiting her paintings for twenty years. After studying History of Art in Florence and in the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, she has since exhibited in Art Fairs in europe, such as the national and PAn Art Fairs in Holland as well as showing regularly in group exhibitions in London. She often works directly with interior architects to commission unique pieces for their spaces.

Her striking textural paintings are created out of a mutual interaction between herself and the people she creates for, as well as in response to the vitality of life. For her most recent solo exhibition in 2009, LeeF! (JuST Live!), her paintings were exhibited outdoors to enhance the relationship that art plays in the positive energy of life. The female is an important emblem in her work, if rarely represented figuratively.

[OPPOSITE] Joost Beerents, GOLDPLAy,221 x 165 cm / 87” x 65”

Joost Beerents, neW yORK CiTy,221 x 165 cm / 87” x 65”

Bridget Leaman

A fine art graduate of the Bournemouth College of Art and the West Surrey School of Art, Bridget moved to the Lizard Peninsular in 1972. The Cornish landscape is fundamental to her art. She is not by any means a traditional landscape painter, yet it is the contradicting qualities of her rich surroundings in West Cornwall that she manifests in her abstract canvases. Leaman’s paintings operate in the tensions between stillness and movement, solidity and transience, colours, light and textures. in these ambivalences, she challenges our perceptive faculties. She describes her artistic practise as:

‘Pushing BoundariesOnly to find what has already been done

Painting is not like moving forward in a straight lineIt is more like a circle’

Bridget has shown regularly with Cadogan Contemporary since 1993.

Bridget Leaman, ROunDABOuT, 102 x 102 cm / 40” x 40”

Bridget Leaman, FLiGHT, 102 x 102 cm / 40” x 40”

Jim Whitty

Jim Whitty is a London and Somerset-based artist who trained at the Glasgow School of Art and drew much of his initial inspiration from the aquatic landscape of north West Scotland. His current work, whilst still motivated by an interest in the dynamic of water, is more ubiquitous and describes or alludes to natural forms that are universal. Jim produces large canvases: these landscape oil paintings could be described as abstract in that they do not depict a scene or place, and that the overall aesthetic form is more important than the physical object depicted. They commonly allude to the photographic process; the way movement is captured; freezing an instant or showing the blurring of movement through time in the natural world. Despite this seemingly analytical approach to painting, his works are still primarily emotional and evocative.

Jim has shown in Scotland, London and abroad. He has won several awards and competitions, and has had regular exhibitions with Cadogan Contemporary since 2002.

[OPPOSITE DETAIL] Jim Whitty, PALeTTe iv (enCHAnTeD WATeRS),102 x 229 cm / 40” x 90”

Jim Whitty, MiDniGHT,102 x 229 cm / 40” x 90”

Deborah Tarr

Deborah Tarr was born in Manchester in 1966. She trained as a painter at Winchester School of Art in the mid-eighties and continues to develop her work very much in the modernist tradition. She has exhibited around the country, including the islington and Olympia Art Fairs in London, the Bruton gallery in Bath and new york, and has had a number of solo exhibitions in London. She has numerous international private collections, including a commission for Winchester Cathedral, work in Hampshire County Council and in university College Hospital in London.

Her paintings are lyrical and abstract; creating a sense of nature in which a human emotional presence is strongly felt. Typically made in oil, layered and enriched over time but still maintaining a freshness - the essence of ‘alla prima’ - the surfaces offer a space from which a sort of poetry is extracted. The titles, such as ‘gentle traces of a friendship’ or ‘on the walk’, which are often given when the work is complete, resonate with general mood of the piece. inspiration is often garnered from travel but the work is always made on reflection in the studio. She lives in Primrose Hill, London but spends much of her time in her studio in Cheshire.

[OPPOSITE] Deborah Tarr, unTiTLeD,157 x 147 cm / 62” x 58”

Deborah Tarr, BRiLLiAnT TReeS, x cm / ” x”

Kate Hunt, BRiLLiAnT TReeS i,109 x 89 cm / 43” x 35”

Kate Hunt

Abstract or highly abstracted, Kate Hunt’s works appear to allude to memory, or the creative act of uncovering it. in her painterly processes –layers of translucent paint, rubbed and scratched - she echoes the searching processes of cognition. Her 2009 exhibition Uncover was described as ‘connecting work… brave in its intimacy’, by Alice McConnachie, who wrote about her show: ‘it yearns to find the fragile materiality of the past and to join this with the honesty and visibility of the creative process.’ Having studied at St. Martin’s, Byam Shaw, Sir John Cass and Wimbledon Art Schools, she has exhibited with the Royal Academy, the Royal College of Art, the Gallery of Modern Art and Cadogan Contemporary in London, as well as in various national and european galleries and institutions.

Kate Hunt, FOunDATiOn ii, 102 x 120 cm / 40” x 47”

Anthony Bryant

Anthony Bryant was born in West Cornwall in 1960. He absorbed the vocabulary of the changing artistic community of St. ives as much as the landscapes and the seascapes he grew up around.

Today he treads his own path to paint powerful abstracts which sing with colour and energy to resonate profoundly with the viewer, exhibiting in various prestigious shows around the country.

The final tangible surface of the finished painting is crucial to him and he will work on each piece for a long time to allow a richness to accumulate which hints at or is scattered with clues alluding to the depth and life history of the painting beneath.

He states: ‘my paintings are my distilled response to emotional experience. i paint instinctively, but aim to make paintings which resolve an unfiltered visceral impact with a certain degree of cohesive refinement.’ His work was recently commended in ‘The Cornishman’ in 2010 as ‘multi-layered paintings that can, in fact, be read in any way the viewer chooses, they have a presence which is commanding and commendable as it is pleasing and painterly.’

[OPPOSITE] Anthony Bryant, CORE,122 x 122 cm / 48” x 48”

Andrew Johnstone, ROAD TO JeRuSALeM (881),81 x 91 cm / 32” x 36”

Andrew Johnstone

Born in 1933, Andrew Johnstone was educated at Marlborough College, Strasbourg university and St. John’s Oxford, plus two terms at the Ruskin School of Art. He served in egypt with the Scots Guards and joined the Foreign Service in he was posted to Lebanon, where he learned Arabic, then to Aden, Oman, Syria, Pakistan, Cambodia and ireland.

At all his foreign postings Andrew Johnstone painted and drew. He had a one-man show in Rawalpindi with the British Council and exhibited in Belfast and the Royal irish Academy when he was in ireland. He retired in 1973 to a smallholding in West Cornwall with his wife, where he has been painting ever since.

Painting from a series of ‘half a dozen or so’ themes, usually from the ancient world, his techniques and idioms often stem from the modern artists he admires: Roger Hilton, Ben nicholson and William Scott. For the past ten years he has regularly exhibited his paintings, and occasionally his sculptures, at the islington Art Fair and the 20/21 British Art Fair, as well as having a series of one-man shows in London, and at Cadogan Contemporary. in 1989 he was the subject of a documentary on iTv.

“My own work is domestic and small scale. it is for looking at and enjoying in a home environment… just to be there and to feed the spirit and imagination. Balm for the soul, if you like. if a painting of mine does that and, most importantly, goes on doing that, then i am happy: it is a good painting as far as i am concerned. i am not setting out to build a career – it is a bit late for that anyway – but to let my imagination wander over what i have seen, years ago or yesterday, and to let my mind and hands synthesise that into a painting or, more rarely these days, a sculpture. This will probably not resemble at all what i have been looking at; it will be some new creation that comes from my imagination... But i also go off at perhaps ridiculous tangents when something catches my eye or amuses me. Why not?

For me, painting, or at least making, is not an interest or a pastime: it is a compulsion.”

Andrew Johnstone, 1056,74 x 81 cm / 29” x 32”

Philip Mount

Philip Mount first gained representation by a gallery aged 17. He began illustrating in 1996 for the evening Standard and in the following four years became the first artist to be employed by the House of Commons since Turner in 1853, sketching the construction of Portcullis House. His body of work diverges between vibrant cityscape ‘sketches’ and large-scale abstract paintings. Bold use of colour and the Pollock-esque energy he extracts from the viscosity of paint creates the illusion of movement and life in static spaces. He achieves tangible form derived from a seemingly unstructured and chaotic application by merging pre-determined action with intuitive responses.

Widely collected internationally, both privately and by corporations, Mount’s art has been exhibited in a London fashion show, Christie’s Contemporary Art and the palace of Westminster.

[OPPOSITE] Philip Mount, UnTITLED CEnTRE BLACk,157 x 127 cm / 62” x 50”

Maria Luisa Hernandez

Maria Luisa Hernandez was born in Santiago in 1966 and gained a Bachelor of Arts Degree at university of Chile. Since being invited to exhibit in Stockholm when it was the cultural capital of europe in 1988 for a government funded exhibition entitled ‘Living in the Light’, she has developed an international following. She has studied at the Prince’s Drawing School in London and currently lives and works by the Thames. She now exhibits widely across europe, is collected by celebrities as well as multinational corporations and was last year was chosen as one of Courvoisier and the Observer’s The Future 500 Rising Stars.

Her powerful, abstracted canvases reflect the forces of the nature in the vein of Turner, focused around the axis of the five elements as they appear in the landscape. The art critic Pedro Labowitz lauded her work as ,”in essence, an atmosphere play of colour and light, the two anchors of her work. Her hallmark is insinuation and evocation rather than description.”

[OPPOSITE] Maria Luisa Hernandez, FREE WAVES I,89 x 89 cm / 35” x 35”

[OPPOSITE] Maria Luisa Hernandez, PLUTOS,99 x 196 cm / 39” x 77”

FROnT AnD BACk InnER COVER: Detail of Joost Beerents, ‘SiLenCe’, 51 x 51cm / 20” x 20”

CADOGAn COnTeMPORARy87 OLD BROMPTOn ROADLOnDOnSW7 3LD

Tel: +44 (0)20 7581 5451info@cadogancontemporary.comwww.cadogancontemporary.com