Nicola Tyson, Beyond the Trace at Drawing Room until 12th November
“When I begin to draw, I have no idea what’s going to appear. I work swiftly, to stay just ahead of the cage of language, the linear mind and rational decision-making. I just let the forms grow themselves, self-organise…”
Nicola Tyson (b. 1960, London, UK) Lives and works in New York, USA.
Beyond the Trace is the first comprehensive solo exhibition in the UK of Nicola Tyson’s drawings. A British artist based in New York, since the early 90s, Tyson has been making drawing alongside painting, photography, performance, the written word and more recently sculpture. Drawing is the foundation of all her work.
Beyond the Trace is the first solo exhibition in the UK of Tyson’s drawings. The exhibition includes two new large-scale works on paper made for the exhibition, a suite of new colour monotypes and a series of recent drawings. Working intuitively and from memory, Tyson’s gestural works are a reimagining of the female body. They are highly animated, androgynous and surreal.
Kudzanai-Violet Hwami, If You Keep Going South You’ll Meet Yourself at Tyburn Gallery until 15th November
“In my paintings, I like to create a positive future… like a utopia-dream. So, I paint the future of Zimbabwe in a light manner instead of painting what goes on now, because that doesn’t help me heal.”
Kudzanai-Violet Hwami (b. 1993, Gutu, Zimbabwe) Lives and works in London, UK.
For this exhibition, Hwami draws inspiration from her family photographs, evoking the nostalgia and longing of childhood joy, as well as her experience of the diaspora. The works are a meditation on the idea of home and multiple homes. The stories behind the works blur into the autobiographical, family connections and the idea of shared memory.
Typically, the artist begins her work by creating digital collages, playing with images, photographs and text freely; cutting and rearranging in order to make her desired composition. She sees the stage of making digital studies as the most creative and intuitive part of her process, before she begins to transfer the image to a large-scale canvas, adding her painterly sensibility into the mix of bold form and colour.
Thomas Dozol, Memory Played Me Like a Violin at French Riviera until 3rd December
“The series of portraits was conceived as a documentation of conversations rather than formal seatings. I only picked people that I wanted to have a conversation with, and once they were in my studio, the focus remained on the exchange. While I was shooting, I knew that a few photographs would be the only silent documentation of that exchange.
The shapes are first hand drawn. I sketch over printouts of the photographs, over and over again, until the interaction between the geometry and the captured moment seem to echo my interpretation of the person portrayed. I then screenprint the shapes over the photographs.”
Thomas Dozol (b. 1975, Fort De France, Martinique) Lives and works in New York, USA.
Dozol takes a particular interest in body portraiture. He explores how we both, the portrayed subject and us the viewers, respond to the obscuring and becoming of a new purposely-shaped focus of observation by the photographer. Taking his close-up and intimate studio portraits as source material, he layers the photographs with semi-obscured monochrome graphics. Balancing fashion and early-days printing aesthetics of basic geometries and block colour, Dozol presents a highly distinctive and poetic signature style.
