PAPER gallery - At Our Still Lives Posed

Axel Obiger, working in collaboration with PAPER will draw together the practices of 12 artists working in both Berlin and the United Kingdom. Each artist attempts to disrupt the notion of still life, and reinterpret this genre of art. Still Life was considered the lowest genre of art, and yet in the composition of objects, artists can imply a great deal. Frances Morris wrote of Picasso's still lives, they are "capable of evoking the most complex blend of pathos and defiance, of despair to hope, balancing personal and universal experience in an expression of extraordinary emotional power. The hardship of daily life, the fragility of human existence and the threat of death". These themes permeate through the genre where they remain ever present to this day, simmering below the surface.

In the heyday of Dutch still lives, craftsmanship was crucial. Objects were arranged with precision, emphasising light and shadow, in order to create a compositional tension. Each object was selected for its symbolic meaning, highlighted through the drama of the composition. Observers marvelled at the Trompe l'oeil effect, freezing the objects in time; a study of death. Peter Hock's charcoal drawings make use of these qualities from still life painting, taking them to extremes of chiaroscuro. Light falls on an object rendered in monochrome, depicted by Hock as “abstract realism”. Merja Kokkonen is interested in nature, bodies and their movement, birth, death, and religious practice. If figurative vanitas still lives of the early modern era remind us of the ephemerality of pleasure and the inevitability of death, then medieval saint’s relics offer us much more direct interactions with once-living matter. The very physicality of the preserved body, defying time and decay, can be seen as a reminder of the miracle of existence, a memento nasci (remember that you must be born).

David Hancock's paintings fluctuate between the subject and object. Painted meticulously from a still life diorama, the selected objects contain their own narrative, which through the process of amalgamation, transform themselves into specific roles for the staged composition. They re-interpret the recital of a historical artwork appropriating elements of the original work of art. Similarly for Louise Bristow, one of the pleasures of making is the juxtaposition of objects that in reality would not be found in the same time or space. She accentuates the mismatch of scale and a collision of visual languages in the set-ups: she will place a realistic three-dimensional architectural model next to a flat image of a landscape, an abstract geometric form and a scrap of coloured paper. To her everything is simply ‘material’ and there is a democracy to how she treats everything.

Caitlin Griffiths explores the relationship between reality and individual identity, drawing on photography's means to observe and document place, people and performance. Her still lives pairing an unopened box and with an open box references Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment. Reality is only summoned into existence through the act of observing it. Hannah Wooll employs found images from books and objects found in charity shops. She transforms these items into a self contained still life, repurposes them with her cast of lost girls. Niina Lehtonen Braun uses collaged items: alcohol bottles, flowers, clocks, cakes, coffee-cups, cigarettes, laundry etc. These objects have a certain domestic resonance. They suggest the passing of the time? The passing of a life? Her still lives are an opportunity to reflect on death; a momento mori.

Lisa Denyer creates mixed-media paintings that toy with the idea of their function as object, shifting between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional, they are neither wholly painting or sculpture. Louisa Chambers’ recent work responds to the idiosyncrasies in architecture (ornamentation, pattern, shape, surface and structure). Appropriated patterns from walls, fences, floors are translated onto architectural paper and transfigured into a temporary three-dimensional structure. These forms are recorded from observation becoming an abstracted still life. She is interested in the patterned tessellations that are on the surface of these forms and when manipulated create other spaces, angles and areas of illusion. Matthew Macaulay’s paintings have been developed through observations and experience of objects. The formal elements of objects, such as texture, pattern and colour, are extracted and combined within the works. The paintings attempt to capture the elusive nature of the natural world by transforming and cloaking elements through the creation of painterly signs, drawn from a large still life constructed from a mixture of artworks and other objects from the studio.

Ruby Tingle's recent works blur the line between object and image; the imagined textures of her paper cutouts inform a new three dimensional situation in which the collages now exist- their landscapes flitting between pictorial space and fragments of mythical skin. Maja Rohwetter follows a structured conceptual approach to painting that includes the diffuse and the rational, questioning the variables in construction of a picture and representations of reality. As objects are arranged and composed in the classical still life, Rohwetter arranges the picture elements of her collages. The act of arranging and composing is essential and always visible, the picture is a snapshot of a temporary condition. A still.

Louise Bristow