Lucinda Metcalfe – ENJOY
Dates: 20 April – 26 May, Open Wed – Fri 10-3pm, Sat 10-6pm
BEARSPACE is pleased to present a solo exhibition of exciting new paintings by Lucinda Metcalfe, which are immersive in their style. Through these brightly coloured paintings, she invites the viewer into often artificial vacation environments selling the viewer a dream of a holiday, seen through the layers of paint and light. Metcalfe’s recent works play with the colours and textures of the holiday idyll alongside an absence of everyday life, luring the visitor into the promise of escape.
This body of work represents recent places the artist has travelled including Cyprus where she had an exhibition at the Cyprus College of Art & Las Vegas where she took a once in a lifetime trip to capture vacation locations across this city. The artist says about Las Vegas that ‘the hotels feel like shopping centres and often are. The leisure facilities are all about transporting you into a fantasy world.’
The artist has been experimenting with ways in which she allows the viewer to enter the environments more fully. Her more abstract and fluid style for example in the new piece ‘Liquify’ creates a mesmerising interplay between the reflected and refracted tiles and the surface of the water in the pool. This sensitivity to the surface and interplay between the subject and pallete often of subdued tones, is underpinned by an underlying sense of artificiality. This is achieved through the artists use of colour, most notably the persistent fluorescent ground which visually unifies this whole body of work. Metcalfe’s signature painting style builds up layers of oil paint over the flat fluorescent base. This causes the fluorescent colour to peer through the surface of the work making even the most tranquil vacation scene at dusk radiate an energy and depth which is inescapable.
Lucinda Metcalfe gained her MA at the Slade School of Fine Art in 2001, gaining a distinction. She was selected for New Contemporaries as part of the Liverpool Biennale and shown at the Barbican Curve. She has since untaken residencies at the Cyrus School of Art in Paphos and with singer/songwriter Imogen Heap at the Round House in Essex. Other notable exhibitions are at the Terry Frost Gallery, Cyprus College of Art and group exhibitions at Foyles Gallery, Charing Cross and ‘NO PLACE’ the Royal Overseas League with BEARSPACE in 2017. She was a contestant for the Sky Arts, ‘Landscape Artist of the Year’ in 2015.
Image credit: Lucinda Metcalfe, Hot Water, Acrylic and oil on canvas, 100cm x 150cm (above)