CYNTHIA CORBETT GALLERY IN RESIDENCE AT THE EXHIBITIONIST HOTEL

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Lauded by Annabel Sampson, Deputy Editor of Tatler as “the next David Hockney” painter Andy Burgess, who hails from London but lives in Arizona, continues to expand upon his fascination with contemporary architecture. A new series of paintings on panel and canvas colourfully re-imagines iconic modernist and contemporary houses. Burgess selects the subjects for his paintings with the discernment of the portrait painter. Buildings are chosen for their clean lines, bold geometric design and dynamic forms. Burgess approaches his subjects with a fresh eye, simplifying and abstracting forms even further and inventing, somewhat irreverently, new color schemes that expand the modernist lexicon beyond the minimalist white palette and rigid use of primary colours. Real places are sometimes re-invented, the architecture and design altered and modified, with new furniture and landscaping and a theatrical lighting that invests the painted scene with a dream-like quality and a peaceful and seductive allure.

In 2021 Andy Burgess will be creating a series of site-specific artworks for the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London. The project, initiated by CW+ – the official charity of the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust – and facilitated by Cynthia Corbett Gallery, which represents Burgess internationally, aims to improve and enhance the NICU environment for patients, relatives and staff.

Working together with the NICU team, Burgess will be reminiscing on the hospital’s neighbourhoods and its iconic views, sights and buildings in collaboration with hospital staff. The selected London scenes will be transformed by the artist in his unique, abstract, geometric style and printed on medically compliant vinyl – to then be installed in corridors and waiting areas of NICU.

“This project inspires me tremendously and I’m excited to be embarking on this creative journey with the hospital and CW+,” explains the artist, Burgess. “I am delighted to have been identified for this unique opportunity and to be working with NICU staff to contribute to the improvement of the environment in this innovative way.”

Burgess, who has made a name for himself exploring the relationship between modernist architecture and contemporary painting, aims to instil the artwork with feelings of positivity and calmness, while staying true to his British and London heritage and his love of early 20th century art, architecture and collage. He will be creating a multi-layered narrative, incorporating his signature open primary colours and clean lines.

Andy Burgess has been represented internationally by Cynthia Corbett Gallery since 2004.

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Fabiano Parisi began his career as a photographer following a degree in Psychology, coming to photography through a project photographing derelict asylums, which sparked his interest in the abandoned buildings which are the subject of his art practice today. He has two ongoing series: The Empire of Light and Il Mondo Che Non Vedo (The World I Do Not See). The latter title is taken from a collection of poems by Fernando Pessoa, a hint at the poetic qualities of Parisi’s work. What is so striking about Parisi’s work is his use of light, his relationship not just to history but to the theme of the ruin in Art History, and the composition and surface of his work. The power of Parisi’s work lies in the strength and command of his image-making, never straying from a strictly symmetrical approach, which allows the viewer to assume his viewpoint within the building, the wide-angle lens giving a sense of depth and breadth, without compromising on detail.

Parisi uses only natural light, shooting early in the morning. The colours and chiaroscuro are at their best at this time of day, and are left untouched by digital image manipulation software. Parisi’s photographs have an honesty and integrity that is part of what makes them so inviting. The artist often selects buildings with frescoed walls, which create an illusion of a painterly surface in his photographs and a textural sensibility that belies the photograph’s flat surface. His method highlights the patina of these forgotten places. The artist prints his work himself onto carefully chosen papers that enhance and maximise his colours and tones. Parisi has a strong relationship to Art History; the subject of the ruin was prevalent in the 18th and 19th Centuries, and interest is still strong today as evidenced by Tate Britain’s 2014 exhibition ‘Ruin Lust’. From painters such as Piranesi to Turner to Constable, Parisi is part of an important genre in art.

Parisi participated in the 54th Venice Biennale, Italian Pavilion and in Fotografia Festival Internazionale di Roma in 2012 at the Macro Museum. In 2010 he was the winner of the Celeste Prize International for photography in New York; in 2012 he was shortlist for the Arte Laguna Prize, Venice where he was award a special Prize and in 2012 & 2014 he was shortlisted & announced finalist for the Young Masters Art Prize (a not-for-profit initiative presented by Cynthia Corbett Gallery, London).

Fabiano Parisi is represented internationally by Cynthia Corbett Gallery.

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In a contemporary art world that condemns beauty as camouflage for conceptual shallowness, championing high aesthetics is nothing short of rebellion. Dutch photographer Isabelle Van Zeijl takes female beauty ideals from the past, and sabotages them in the context of today. Van Zeijl aestheticises contemporary beauty in her work to visually discuss art historical links and a new way of seeing female beauty. Her work is both timeless, universal and uniquely placed in the art historical canon while offering the female gaze.

Van Zeijl is invested in her images. By using subjects that intrigue and evoke emotion, she reinvents herself over and over and has created a body of work to illustrate these autobiographical narratives. Her work takes from all she experiences in life - she is both model, creator, object and subject. Going beyond the realm of individual expression, so common in the genre of self-portraiture, she strives to be both universal and timeless, with a subtle political hint.

Isabelle Van Zeijl has shown work continuously and internationally over the past fifteen years, represented by galleries located in The UK, USA, The Netherlands, Belgium, and exhibiting at emerging and established international art fairs in New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, London, Germany, Belgium, Sweden and Italy. She was nominated for the Prix De La Photographie Paris, and The Fine Art Photography Awards. She was also one of the winners of The Young Masters Emerging Women Art Prize, London. Her work is held in private & public collections in the USA, UK, Belgium, Germany, France and The Netherlands.

Isabelle van Zeijl has been represented by Cynthia Corbett Gallery since 2017.

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‘America has Lichtenstein, we have Azzopardi!’ - Estelle Lovatt FRSA

Deborah Azzopardi acquired her worldwide fame for the joyous Pop Art images she has created over the past 35 years. Her unique and feminine take on contemporary art is best described by the esteemed art critic Estelle Lovatt: ‘America has Lichtenstein, we have Azzopardi!’ Lovatt goes on to comment: “Sometimes you just want to curl up under a blanket. With a good book. A piece of chocolate. A man. This is what Deborah Azzopardi’s pictures make me feel like doing. They are me. They remind me of the time I had a red convertible sports car. I had two, actually. And yes, they are you, too. You immediately, automatically, engage with the narrative of Azzopardi’s conversational visual humour. Laughter is the best aphrodisiac, as you know. ... There’s plenty of art historical references from... Manet’s suggestive ‘Olympia’; Boucher’s thought-provoking... ‘Louise O’Murphy’ and Fragonard’s frivolous, knickerless, ‘The Swing’.... Unique in approach, you easily recognise an Azzopardi picture. ... Working simple graphics and toned shading (for depth), the Pop Art line that Azzopardi sketches is different to Lichtenstein’s. Hers is more curvaceous. Feminine.”

The world is familiar with Azzopardi’s artworks, as many of them have been published internationally. Her original paintings, such as the Habitat ‘Dating’ series (2004/08), the iconic ...One Lump Or Two? (2014) and Love Is The Answer (2016), created by the artist at the request of Mitch and Janis Winehouse as a tribute to their daughter, are in great demand. This year we are pleased to bring to Expo CHGO Azzopardi's new special commission for Conservation International, Mother Nature (2020).

Deborah Azzopardi is represented internationally by Cynthia Corbett Gallery.

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Tuëma Pattie (b. 1938) was born in Dublin and studied at the Belfast College of Art, the Central School of Art and Design and Morley College, London, Piers Ottey and Christopher Baker in Sussex and Robin Child in Devon.

In her days in Belfast and London, she took advantage of urban scenes as her subject matter. She then had a long period in which she took time out to have two children and to support her husband in his career. This meant it was difficult to find the time for her beloved painting, as was the case for many women in that era.

With the move out of London in 1989, she did have the subsequent benefit of much foreign travel. Subject matter was carefully gathered with the resultant explosion of energy into her canvases, with paintings from the Galapagos, Antarctica, Spain, Italy and Uzbekistan as well as her beautiful West Sussex. It is from this period that she was able to develop into the world of experimental landscapes.

Tuëma Pattie has exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition; the Royal Hibernian Summer Exhibition; the Cork Street Gallery; Art for Youth at the Mall Gallery London; London Art Fair; the Chichester Open; the Moncrief Bray Gallery, the Kevis House Gallery and the Rowntree Tryon Gallery all in Petworth; APPART; the East Hampshire Art Fair; the Jorgensen Gallery in Dublin and at Glyndebourne.

“To me, painting has always been an opportunity to interpret imaginatively what I see in front of me. The facts are there – it is how one brings them to life that is the magic”, – Pattie says.

Tuëma Pattie is internationally represented by Cynthia Corbett Gallery.

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Born and raised in New York City, Elise Ansel translates Old Master paintings into a contemporary pictorial language. She mines art historical imagery for color and narrative structure. Her paintings use the Old Masters as points of departure. They move into abstraction by transforming the representational content, which is obfuscated, if not entirely obscured, by her focus on color, gesture and the materiality of the paint. Ansel’s work strikes a balance between conscientious precision and irrational improvisation. She begins with a series of small spontaneous oil studies and subsequently transcribes these into large scale paintings, using Renaissance methods and a grid. The large paintings embrace the choreography of the small works with an increased emphasis on color and gesture. Spontaneity, instinct and intuition eclipse rational, linear thinking during the process of making the small works. Ansel's work fuses accident and design, intuition and intellect, abandon and constraint. The real subject becomes the substance and surface of oil paint, the range of its applications, the ways it can be used to celebrate life.

Ansel currently lives in Portland, Maine. She received a BA in Comparative Literature from Brown University in 1984. While at Brown, she studied art at both Brown and the Rhode Island School of Design. She earned her MFA in Visual Art from Southern Methodist University in 1993. Ansel has exhibited throughout the United States and in Europe, and her works are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art and the Evansville Museum of Arts and Sciences.

In 2014 Elise Ansel was a Finalist of the Young Masters Art Prize and her artwork has since been exhibited and represented by Cynthia Corbett Gallery internationally.

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Oliver Jones is an award winning visual artist working from his studios in rural Shropshire, after spending the first part of his career working from and co-running studios in Birmingham. His work is collected and exhibited both nationally and internationally and can be found in some highly notable public and private collections throughout the UK, Los Angeles and Istanbul. Of particular note was his critically well-received “Love the Skin You’re In” his first North Atlantic solo show at GUSFORD|los angeles. The drawings in the show depicted commonly used slogans and industry tag lines, identified in their titles however their images described a reality far from the usual glossy photographs one would usually find in magazines and advertising. Instead they presented images far closer to that reality which one would confront more often during their beauty rituals and cosmetic regimes, and reflected a scrutiny of the surface of flesh and an honesty in how it is more commonly experienced.

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Ru Knox is an English artist who had an extensive classical training at one of the most prestigious ateliers in the world. He has spent years as a professional classical portraitist, fulfilling private commissions and exhibiting both in the UK and abroad and he has had much success in international competitions. He is currently exhibiting in London galleries whilst working towards an MA in Fine Art at City and Guilds. Ru combines rigorous formal structure with his own original ideas, displaying his unique and personal style. His abstract works have developed from pure traditional representation to a more contemporary approach but retain references to his extensive classical training at one of the most prestigious ateliers in the world. Ru’s raw imagery renders a deeply sculptural yet intangible quality especially when his work is viewed in ‘real-life’. These processes achieve both a synergy and a tension between fine intricate draughtsmanship and sheer abstraction, forming a dynamic and lifting conversation between creator and spectator. His large paintings hang poised between a spatial world of depth and form populated with suggested characters that hint at untold narratives that have an immediate confrontation with the raw materiality of painting. The paint has been blended and scrubbed in some areas, left to trickle and bleed in others, built up and scraped back again laboriously, in forceful pursuit of the final effect.

The artist explains his inspiration: "These paintings are immersive environments, designed to encourage an optimal creative experience. The ambiguous shapes and forms, which are expressed with vibrant colours and painterly techniques, invite the viewer to create a subjective narrative, based upon their own collection of thoughts and memories. The overall effect is a sense of harmony and dissonance, cadence and rhythm, focus and disorientation.
Acquiring these visual cues the viewer's role moves from the acquiescent and into the realm of creation as they are invited to stimulate their own rapturous sensation".

Ru Knox is exhibiting as Guest artist of Cynthia Corbett Gallery. 

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Highly acclaimed French painter Anne Françoise Couloumy, Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, has been named 'La Hopper Française' by the French press.

A student of Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, she has exhibited in France since 1994 with great success. Mentored by XX century French painter Boris Taslitzky, whose paintings are in the Tate Gallery's collection, she has a unique pedigree. In contrast to Kamps – French by nationality and Northern European in her use and sense of light – Couloumy paints as if she spent her life on the foggy banks of Amsterdam' canals. The intimacy and the serene silence of Couloumy's quiet paintings are reminiscent of Hammershøi and Vermeer. Nonetheless, Couloumy doesn't fit in any particular school of painting and her work is timeless, classical and contemporary. There is an air of mystery that surrounds her work, which suits the artist as she has little time for explanation and analysis. A Couloumy painting is much more than just a painting, it is a reflection of life.

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The paintings of Susanne Kamps ´are chromatic organisms, entirely of their own kind. On the one hand, they assert their obligation to tradition, on the other hand they celebrate individuality and boundless independence, as if they never heard of the great role models they evoke…´ wrote one art critic, adding: ´And the beholder, the more he or she tries to grasp the tension, experiences deja-vu – the ´aha´ effect. Who would not, while looking at the painting of Susanne Kamps, think of Matisse…´ - and indeed, her painting Behind the screen, shortlisted for the 5th Edition of the Young Master Prize, pays homage to Matisse´s Intérieur aux aubergines (1911).

Here is the story of Susanne Kamps's tea paintings, as told by the artist: "I have several tea paintings. Fortnum & Mason is one of two twins born from an earlier still life called Smokey Earl Grey: this is the name of a tea flavour sold by Fortnum's which I love. Smokey Earl Grey is a table setting with a lot of grey wall in the background – made with some metal paint rollers I found in a flea market in Budapest (that’s another story). However, it is big and many people do not want to buy big pieces. So, I focused on what was on the table – the cake stands, tea pots and cups – and the twins were born – Fortnum& Mason being the things on the left side of the table and the things on the right I called High Tea. All these paintings were done in 2017".

Susanne Kamps studied under the late Prof Herman-Josef Kuhna at the Academy of Art in Munster, Germany. She works in Dusseldorf, and has also worked in France during several extended stays in Paris (Cite des Arts) and at Roquebrune on the Cote d´Azur. She has also worked in Israel at the Ein Hod artists´ village. Her paintings have been shown in Germany, France and Israel and are in several collections, including the German Re-Insurance Company, WGZ Bank and the Heuking, Kühn law firm.

Susanne Kamps was the recipient of the 2019 Young Masters Art Prize Highly Commended award.

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Art Couture is a series of illuminated sculptures by French artist Nicolas Saint Grégoire. This series pays tribute to Yves Saint Laurent who has been a major influence on Saint Grégoire's practice.

Each illuminated sculpture comprises Plexiglass and neon, and is inspired by dresses created by Saint-Laurent as part of his 1960’s haute couture Pop Collection which Saint-Laurent created in homage to such artists as Mondrian, Wesselmann, Braque, Picasso and Warhol.

Driven by the common quest for harmony of line and colour, Nicolas Saint Grégoire, mentored by the late Pierre Bergé, President of the Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent Foundation, started his research in 2008/09 and was given exclusive access to the Yves Saint Laurent archives. The resultant work entitled Mondrian Dress 1, 2008 was inspired by the 1965 Day Dress created by Saint-Laurent in homage to artist Piet Mondrian.

Mondrian Dress 1, 2008 was presented by The Cynthia Corbett Gallery in Paris, London, Miami, New York, Chicago, Basel and Milan. The success of this work was confirmed by Mondrian Dress 2, 2009 inspired by the same collection, which was reproduced by key French magazines and newspapers such as Le Monde, Beaux Arts and Belles Demeures. The foreign press has equally echoed the Mondrian Dress 2: it was published in Country Life, Easy Jet Magazine, Lawfully Chic - Mishcon de Reya’s Cultural Blog, and featured on Net-a-Porter.

Nicolas Saint Grégoire developed this concept further and created a series of light sculptures exclusively inspired by Yves Saint Laurent dresses, which in turn were inspired by famous artworks. In order to represent the dresses faithfully, Saint Grégoire designed his works sketching directly from the original pieces in the archive, using the same sketching tradition Yves Saint Laurent did many decades before.