Unpacking Gainsborough: Frieze 2021: @ Online

Informed by personal experiences and mixed Japanese-British heritage, my practice addresses notions of loss, longing and identity.

I draw inspiration from nature as well as Japanese and European still life paintings and religious iconography of the 16th-18th century. The works combine the traditional and the contemporary by adopting techniques of the Old Masters to create paintings from digitally rendered collages.

My paintings often feature dark, expansive spaces in which subjects are held unfathomably suspended, alluding to the idea of the void and the numinous. More recent sculptures in wax and clay, and installations using paper, rice and soil, are symbolic of legacy, desire and rebirth.

Materially the works are often part of a Western tradition, while conceptually they are rooted in Eastern philosophy and Japanese aesthetic principles. Almost as a metaphor for my mixed-race heritage, the works lie somewhere between; between abstraction and figuration, the real and the virtual, East and West, presence and absence.

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Dina Bukva is a Croatian designer and artist, born on January 18th 1994 and currently based in Vienna. Her work focuses on portraying women and their friendships. In 2018 Dina graduated with a Master Degree in Graphic and Communication Design from Central Saint Martins.

Shortly after she created the art brand NUDES AND CROISSANTS. The brand celebrates diversity in all aspects and shapes. It is inspired by the beauty found withing everyday life and friendship to human and nature.

Dina has created several animated short films which have been screened in various festivals and awarded as Best Austrian Animation 2018. Since 2019 her work focuses mainly on acrylic paintings and the curation of objects. She is a contributor to the Gault&Millau Magazine and has collaborated with brands such as ZARA.

'I paint women and their friendships. Women inspire me and I’ve had mainly female role models during my whole life. Female family members, friends, activists, artists, celebrities I looked up to. My mother used to paint with me a lot when I was a child. She bought books of artists she admired.

We read about their lives and she would show me paintings that reminded her of me. In school a male teacher told me once I should focus less on my looks because being pretty wouldn’t bring me anywhere in life. I was top of my class and didn’t understand what he wanted. My friend and I decided to dress up and continued studying as hard as we could.

Later on in art school while learning how to use Photoshop the also male teacher used to give us pictures of beautiful women, which we had to retouch. Wrinkles, pores, cheekbones. After that I started retouching my own pictures the same way.

Still I question my femininity on a daily basis. I feel insecure about various topics. I question my whole mental health when feeling emotional especially before getting my menstruation. Or too bossy when I fight for something I believe in. I often struggle with the idea of having children and a family because deep down I somehow expect the whole weight being on my shoulders. I think three times about how men might interpret my outfits - even though I’m very much aware that I can wear whatever the f* I want.

So as long as all those things go through my mind and the mind of my friends I will be painting women and their friendships. So here’s to all females and their female heroes out there.'

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UK-born Matt Smith is well known for his site-specific work in museums, galleries and historic houses. Using clay, textiles and their associated references, he explores how cultural organisations operate using techniques of institutional critique and artist intervention. He is interested in how history is a constantly selected and refined narrative that presents itself as a fixed and accurate account of the past and how, through taking objects and repurposing them in new situations, this can be brought to light. Of particular interest to him is how museums can be reframed into alternative perspectives.

In June 2020 our long-standing partner Contemporary Art Society has acquired twelve ceramic and tapestry works by artist Matt Smith. This acquisition will become a central focus for the displays at the Hove Museum when it reopens. This exciting project was possible due to the Contemporary Art Society’s Rapid Response Fund in partnership with Frieze London, which is a new initiative supporting artists and museums during the Covid-19 pandemic. The CAS Rapid Response Fund is being used to purchase works by artists to add to collections of museums across the UK – ensuring financial support goes where it is needed most. We are thrilled that Hove Museum will now feature a major installation of Matt Smith's artworks, which is highly illustrative of his style and artistic research. Much of Matt Smith’s work explores and comments on marginalised history and it will form a key inspiration for activity sessions as the museum expands its work with groups with varied critical social needs.

"What museums collect, and what this tells us about what society deems important, is an ongoing fascination to me. Recent events have shown how important objects, and particularly sculpture, are in the national debate about who we are and how we got here. I have worked with the museums in Brighton and Hove many times over the last decade and am delighted that this acquisition leads on from that relationship. I look forward to seeing how the works are interpreted and curated to help the widest possible audience feel welcomed and visible within the museums," – Smith says.

In 2015 / 2016, Matt was Artist in Residence at the Victoria and Albert Museum. In 2009 he received the ARC Award for Craft from Aspex Gallery and was awarded the inaugural Young Masters Maylis Grand Ceramics Prize in 2014. At Collect 2018, he was awarded "Object of the Show" by Ekow Eshun. For Collect 2020, Cynthia Corbett and Matt Smith co-curated a site-specific installation featuring textiles and black parian works. The curation was extremely well-received, and Matt was awarded the inaugural Brookfield Properties Crafts Council Collection Prize, which allowed the Crafts Council to purchase six artworks for the Council's collection. The V&A Museum's Design and Textiles department also acquired one of Matt's subversive embroideries.

Matt regularly exhibits his work at public collections including Coming Out, Walker Art Gallery 2017, A Place at the Table, Pallant House, 2014; Subversive Design, Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, 2013; DIY A Revolution in Handicrafts, Society for Contemporary Craft, Pittsburg, 2010.

Matt Smith started his career at the V&A before developing exhibitions at the Science Museum and the British Film Institute. After retraining as a ceramicist, his work has often taken the form of hybrid artist/curator. His large scale solo shows have addressed themes including the legacy of colonisation in Losing Venus (Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford) and Flux: Parian Unpacked (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge), LGBT visibility in Queering the Museum (Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, 2010) and Other Stories (Leeds University Art Collection, 2012). Matt co-directed and curated Unravelling the National Trust which saw over thirty artists working with contemporary craft (including himself) commissioned to respond to the histories of the National Trust properties Nymans House, Uppark House and The Vyne. Matt holds a practice-based PhD from the University of Brighton. The PhD explored the use of craft techniques in contemporary art by artists exploring identities. He is Professor of Ceramics and Glass at Konstfack University of the Arts, Stockholm and Honorary Fellow at the University of Leicester’s School of Museum Studies. His work is held in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Walker Art Gallery, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and the Fitzwilliam Museum as well as numerous private international collections.

Matt Smith is internationally represented by Cynthia Corbett Gallery.

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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 created 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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Lluís Barba constructs his huge photographs with minute attention to detail. During the last twenty years he has developed his distinctive iconography, each work including visual references as people, paintings and his own artworks are transferred to new compositions. Just as artists have for centuries teased their audience with allegory and symbolism, so Barba’s jigsaw of iconography presents a maze of allegorical pathways, the symbolism of the historical sources overlaid with that of the contemporary characters, reinforced by our own personal knowledge and experience and the gravitas afforded by column inches, art criticism and saleroom prices. In Barba’s work we can read the growth of celebrity currency, commentary on recent history and also his own personal reflections: like many historical artists, Barba’s work is also ultimately a giant autobiography. We see photographs of collectors or visitors gathered from trips to international art fairs, including images he has been asked to take by people viewing his own work; there are his motifs such as barcodes, imprinted on his characters; and the rainbows and flowers, his symbols of hope. Wry humour and ironic cross-references colour his visual commentary, as we are invited to navigate between images in the contemporary world, instantly recognisable art historical references and the ever-changing landscape of celebrity icons. When you stand in front of one of Barba’s enormous photographs you are literally in the space of the art as it spreads out before you, sometimes extending into the viewing space with flooring or sculptures spilling from the image.

Born in Spain and educated at the Escola Massana Centre d’Art, Barcelona, Barba has exhibited his work in the United States, Europe, Latin America and Canada. His work is held in major public collections and his private collections include, Jorge M. Pérez, Miami, Rick & Kathy Hilton, California and Wendy Fisher, London.

Lluís Barba was one of the first finalists of the inaugural 2009 Young Masters Art Prize in London. The artist exhibited at the European Pavilion of the 2017 Venice Biennale.

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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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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 The Cynthia Corbett Gallery, London).

Fabiano Parisi is represented internationally by the Cynthia Corbett Gallery.

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Albert Montserrat is totally convinced that ceramics is the most noble, traditional and humanly attached material of all. Also, historically, what this material has allowed us, the humanity, to achieve, in all aspects, from improving our health to a medium of expression, is immense. This makes him feel real veneration and respect to it. He shows a very particular interest for the highly technically demanding oriental glazes from the Old Masters, having inspired him to make an extensive research, giving the strong finish to Montserrat’s work. Glazes are his passion. He is fascinated to see and endlessly test what the chemical elements around us bring to the surface of the vessels that he throws on the wheel. He has a special interest in the traditional vessels that the history of ceramics has brought to us. From the Egyptian canopic jars to the Roman amphoras or the Korean moon jars.

Montserrat has been intensively and continuously making ceramics for over ten years in Spain, Mexico and the UK. His work is held in public collections in Spain and the UK and in private collections in Qatar, USA, UK, Spain, Mexico, Australia, Belgium and France. He won the Barcelona’s Ceramics Biennial in 2018. Montserrat holds several internationally acclaimed awards: Highly Commended Young Masters Maylis Grand Ceramics Prize 2019 and Young Masters Lerouge Knight Art Award 2019.

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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.

In October 2020 Tuëma Pattie had her first international career retrospective exhibition, entitled Tuëma Pattie Retrospective, From Conventional to Experimental, with Cynthia Corbett Gallery at La Galleria, Pall Mall, St. James’s, London, UK.

“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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