Event type: Exhibition

Featuring Caroline Race, Katherine Dereli, Grahame Ashcroft and Laleh Kamalian.

Paying homage to the classic still life genre of art, the artists in this exhibition The Kitchen Table capture the stillness and beauty of this style. The Kitchen Table features quiet still lives of homely, domestic settings and the peaceful moments found in them. As a central focal point of the home, the kitchen table hosts solo dinners, family meals and conversation over cups of tea. A place of exchange and production of meals, food and memories. Race, Dereli, Ashcroft and Kamalian compose simple scenes focusing on arrangement of objects, colour and form.

Caroline Race – “The inspiration for my work comes from everyday items that surround me, or a view from my kitchen window covering different seasons.  I use colour to reflect a sense of space and silence. I also use paper lithographs within some of my oil paintings to create atmosphere, tension and a sense of alonenes. My home is my ‘safe place’, my sense of calm. Sometimes it may take days to achieve a composition; arranging and rearranging the composition until I feel an emotional connection with the objects or a tension between them. Some of the artists I have studied who inspire me are the works of Cezanne, Morandi and Joseph Albers.  I am fascinated with their compositions, reflected light and use of colour.”

Katherine Dereli – Katherine Dereli is an oil painter with a classical training in sculpture. She paints small, with carefully observed colour, creating a varied surface of alternating high detail and broad ‘messy’ brushwork. She takes commission for portraits and creates original landscape and still-life compositions in a distinctive style.

“There is a difference between what we see of a person or a landscape and how we feel about it. As a representational artist I am interested in navigating that perceptual gap. I want to create a painting or sculpture which is loaded with the subjective experience of the artist but with enough breadth for the viewer to formulate their own connection with the subject.”

Grahame Ashcroft – Grahame is a professional artist whose works are in private & municipal collections in the UK, the EU & the USA. He says: “My paintings arrive like strangers at the door. I invite them in, get to know their stories. Exterior landscapes, interior landscapes; the seen and the imagined. Perhaps, after all, they’re the same thing. They combine observation, memory and imagination, not always in equal proportions. From these basic elements I persuade the images towards some kind of coherence, a process I find fascinating, absorbing and utterly compulsive.”

Laleh Kamalian – “Although I am a portrait artist, flowers and nature are also one the subjects I am passionate about and enjoy creating art with. This is the floral collection that I have created in the last couple of years using various media and techniques. My media of choice are pencil and pastel, but some watercolour paintings are included in this collection.

I am a realist artist and would like to capture the world the way I see it. When it comes to nature, I mostly see its beauty.  I am mostly inspired by the colours in the natural environment around us, the vibrancy and the contrast of which has the most profound calming effect on me, and what I would like to be surrounded with at all times.  That is why I draw and paint them, to be able to bring the beauty of the flowers and the greenery inside my- and other people’s homes. I am a sentimental person and would like to express some sort of poetry in my artwork.  My floral art is not exempt. The colours almost sing to me. Sometimes they make me emotional, but mostly they make me smile.”

All artworks are for sale.

Join the Private View of the exhibition on Thursday 20th July from 5pm-7pm.

All welcome, but please register here: https://dot-art-the-kitchen-table.eventbrite.co.uk

The dot-art Gallery can be found at 14 Queen Avenue, Castle Street, Liverpool, L2 4TX (just 5 minutes’ walk from Liverpool One).

Opening times: Tuesday – Saturday, 10am-6pm

The exhibition runs Friday 21st July – 9th September 2023.

Bluecoat is delighted to welcome an exhibition by critically acclaimed interdisciplinary artist Tim Spooner this autumn.

Spooner works across a range of disciplines to create often unpredictable and distinctive work. In A New Kind of Animal he brings an exciting new commission to the Bluecoat, in the form of a host of furry, quivering animatronic sculptures. On display alongside this new commission will be an impressive body of Spooner’s previous work, including over 190 works in collage, painting, sculpture and objects used in performances over the past 15 years.

A New Kind of Animal is a national touring exhibition co-commissioned by Southwark Park Galleries, London and Bluecoat, Liverpool.

Spooner says “I’ve been looking back at a large quantity of existing work: shuffling, filtering and reordering it, looking for undercurrents and patterns. The resulting single, long sequence of old work will serve as a blueprint for the new work at the Bluecoat, a set of instructions for a new kind of animal.”

Spooner’s idiosyncratic work uses materials and objects in ways that reveal unexpected properties. As he has described: “I am interested in ways we try to explain the world: metaphysics and creation myths. My own approach to the mystery is to experiment with how materials behave, to get a better understanding of them. From these I construct collections of sculptures and objects which come together into ideas for possible universes.”

Adam Smythe-Lewis, Senior Curator at the Bluecoat, says “We are thrilled to welcome Tim Spooner and bring his compelling work to our gallery and to North West audiences. It has been wonderful to watch the process as Tim’s intriguing ideas take shape in A New Kind of Animal, and to work with Southwark Park Galleries on the development of this new commission.”

The exhibition runs at Southwark Park Galleries from 15 July – 24 September 2023 before opening at the Bluecoat on Friday 6th October.