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Beep Painting Biennial 2022 winners exhibitionMain Prize winners: Gareth Griffith & Rachel Lancaster
Friends of the Glynn Vivian Welsh Prize winners: Heather Eastes & Dylan Williams
Preview: Friday 19th July 7pm
Exhibition continues until Saturday 14th September
Open: Weds – Sat 11am – 7pm
elysium gallery are proud to present an exhibition by the prize winners of the 2022 Beep Painting Biennial.
From a longlist of over 1000 entrants, the finalists that formed the Beep 2022 exhibition were selected by a panel of judges featuring Beep 2020 main prize winner Rosalind Faram, Oceans Apart gallery director and artist Keith Ashcroft, artist and lecturer Dr Catrin Webster & artist and elysium gallery Director Jonathan Powell. All the prize winners were then selected from the exhibition. The Friends of the Glynn Vivian prize winners were selected by Derek Bainton, Kate Bell and Claire Francis.
Gallery One: (Main prize winners)
Gareth Griffith
‘Adapting to the circumstances we’re in seems pertinent now more than ever in my life. There is a narrative that runs throughout my work which can only be mine. Inevitably there are political references; to my time in Jamaica and my experience of living in a newly emerged post-colonial, highly polarised, often dangerous country; to the current situation that affects all our lives. I hope there are no easy conclusions to be made…. indecision is the mother of invention.
There is an element of retrospection to the work on show here at elysium gallery, as a way of introducing myself’.
Gareth Griffith grew up in Caernarfon, in North Wales, and has lived a short distance from there in Mynydd Llandygai, near Bangor, for over 40 years. He studied at Liverpool College of Art in the early 1960s and spent most of his working life as an art teacher. He is represented in the collections of Amgueddfa Cymru / National Museum Wales, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool and the British Arts Council Collection.
Notable exhibitions in Wales include the 2019 solo touring exhibition ‘Trelar // Trailer‘ curated by Oriel Davies, the show toured to Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Tŷ Pawb, Wrexham and Oriel Myrddin, Carmarthen.
Rachel Lancaster
For Rachel Lancaster, painting slows down the act of looking; it invites the gaze to linger upon the otherwise overlooked. With a focus on the intersections of painting with cinema, photography and music, Lancaster edits and translates photographic ‘stills’ into oil paintings, drawing on found moving imagery, her own photographs, and drawings rendered directly from her imagination.
Although her style is contemporary, Lancaster is indebted to the painterly tradition of still life, and in particular vanitas works – symbolic still life’s that communicate earthly transience and the inevitability of death. She depicts detailed fragments divorced from greater narratives, rendering those fragments both descriptive and abstract, ambiguous and open-ended – the close-up texture of fabric, for example, or an unlabelled parcel, uncannily illuminated, playfully enigmatic. She reveals the uncanny beauty and quiet spectacle that lies beyond the action.
The paintings are made by applying successive thin glazes of translucent oil paint, allowing many layers of colour and texture to accrue over time. Slipping between definition and abstraction, her surfaces contain an array of optical effects. Often, anticipated details give way to looser, minimal rendering that is revealed as a painterly abstraction upon closer inspection. The artist carefully considers subtle decisions about cropping the source material, and through an open ended, intuitive process, evokes a narrative that is full of mystery and intrigue. Careful attention to multiple scales – life size, close up, zoom, at a distance – establish distinct modes of viewing, placing the viewer in different vantage points, on the floor, at eye level, looking down upon the subject. The eerie scenes are as if they are within their own temporality, either stuck in the past or in a limbo state. Reflections, colours and action point beyond the canvas, suggestive of what else is happening outside the image, lurking out of sight. Lancasters work references the dreamlike sense of otherness found, in particular, in cinema, reimagining this upon the canvas.
Rachel Lancaster (b.1979, Hartlepool, UK) lives and works in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. She completed her MFA in Fine Art at Newcastle University and her BA in Fine Art at Northumbria University. She has exhibited widely and taken part in numerous projects, performances and artist residencies both nationally and internationally. She has been included in group exhibitions at The Auxiliary, Middlesbrough, UK; Elysium Gallery, Swansea, Wales, UK; Art Spot Korin, Kyoto, Japan and Venice, Italy; Royal Academy, London, UK; Rye Art Gallery, Kent, UK; Huddersfield Art Gallery, Huddersfield, UK; Baltic 39, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK; and Shophouse, Hong Kong.
Lancaster is the recipient of Ares Mosaic Art Prize, BEEP Painting Prize, and was shortlisted for the Contemporary British Painting Prize. She was Artist-in-Residence at Alewive Brook Road in New York, the former residence and studio of Elaine De Kooning. Her work is held in multiple private collections.
Lancaster is represented by Workplace gallery and is an invited member of Contemporary British Painting.
Gallery Two: (Friends of the Glynn Vivian prize winners)
Heather Eastes
‘My work has always referred to “a time before” Whether searching for meaning through the work process of making smudges and scribbled lines from which associations and memories emerge, or painting on reclaimed wooden panels which recall toys or at the same time, devotional icons, there is a quest to find beginnings, to resolve a sense of loss and dislocation – to find identity, belonging, through examining symbols, animal and human, the child’s head;– the mother and child emerge both as figments in myth and in remembered flesh and blood images. The image has always fascinated and obsessed me, hovering between reality and make-believe, between and beyond times. Its depiction and evocation are a vehicle for reconciliation and catharsis’.
Heather studied BA (Hons) U.C.W. Aberystwyth and MFA at Kunstakademie (Academy of Fine Art) Düsseldorf, Meisterschüler. She is a member of Verein der Düsseldorfer Künstler, the RCA, Conwy, and The Welsh Group. Recent exhibitions include Eisteddfod Genedlaethol Tregaron 2022, Ruth Borchard Self-Portrait Prize 2023, Wales Contemporary 2021, 2022, 2023 – Waterfront Gallery Milford Haven and Oxo Tower Building, London. ING Discerning Eye 2020,2022 Mall Galleries, London Paper after All Royal Cambrian Academy, Conwy, Saul Hay and Paper Galleries, Manchester 2023
Dylan Williams
‘My work has always been born from a deep connection to my surroundings, mostly from the scenery of Wales; drawn from a deep connection to the hills and fields and forest I’ve walked through all my life. Using the landscape to explore my roots beyond the realm of sight to the environment and other metaphysical connections, spirits, energy and dreams belonging to the land. My paintings attempt to summon the meditative nature of the landscape to contemplate the transcendental, piercing through the hills to the language of the cosmos. I’m attempting to consolidate these streams of lived and inherited experiences with the landscape into calm, muted works; with the minimal application of the paint attempting to aspire to the quiet, muteness of the natural world. More recently I’ve been concerned with working from scenes from my everyday life in London, using my daily surroundings as a portal to creating dreamlike imagery, and striving to achieve a transcendental simplicity through pictures and compositions. I’ve become interested in the unsettling power of ordinary scenes taken away from their daily context, and how they can form a narrative of their own’.
Dylan Williams (b 1995) is a Welsh painter from Neath based in London, he completed his BA and MA from Swansea College of Art and has had group and solo shows across the UK, Europe and the USA, his work is held in major collections in the US and Asia. Recent exhibitions include Portal, Arusha Gallery, London 2023; A Room with a View, Vardan Gallery Los Angeles, 2023; Through a glass darkly, with Lucia Jones, Visible records, Charlottesville, 2023; Recent paintings with James Morse, Scroll gallery, New York 2024; Bright Night with Jorg Kratz, Gallerie Mathilde Le Coz, Paris, 2024; Moodlight, vcrb gallery, Antwerp, 2024; Shudder Mornings, Cabin, Berlin, 2024.
www.elysiumgallery.com
www.beeppaintingbiennial.com
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
210 High Street, SA1 1PE Swansea, United Kingdom, 210 High Street, Swansea, SA1 1, United Kingdom,Swansea, United Kingdom
