CHRIS HAWTIN / MECHANISE

BEARSPACE @Art Projects, London Art Fair STAND P11

17-21 January 2018

Islington Business Design Centre

 

BEARSPACE presents MECHANISE, including new works by painter Chris Hawtin.  Chris Hawtin’s paintings depict lush rolling landscapes such as would be found in the era of early classical painting, a landscape idyll free from industry and urbanisation.  Crashing into these paintings Chris introduces the ever-developing space forms, like vessels from another time and dimension, they travel through from one painting to the next exploring the landscape and often introducing primeval elements creating a slippage between time, place and dimension.

 

Whilst a comment on man’s fascination with the acceleration of technology and science fiction, these works look deeper into the genre.  The artist excavates the nature of a painting as it is faced with the undeniable future of art and technology like an invasion into fine art, and how as artists this is evaluated, and reconciled within their own practice.

 

This presentation will also include a film of a virtual world made in collaboration with digital artist Emile Swain whereby the surface of one of Hawtin’s paintings becomes a landscape itself, the site of some past event; in part a verdant habitat of trees and flowers and partly an urban centre of multiple buildings, yet something has occurred where mysterious spires have sprouted from the earth. This digital environment has been developed by Hawtin and Swain over the course of 2017 and is a continuous evolving arena which feeds into the narrative of Hawtin’s paintings.

 

Chris Hawtin graduated from his BA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art and Design in 1999 and has since been working and exhibiting in the UK, Athens and Lisbon.  The artist lives and works in South East London.  His work is in private collections internationally and the Saatchi collection in London.

 

 

Image credit: 

Chris Hawtin,

Dawn Chorus

170x160cm

Oil and acrylic on Canvas

£3800

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 (Above). All works can be viewed online at www.bearspace.co.uk

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