LYDIA GIFFORD

LYDIA GIFFORD

http://davidrobertsartfoundation.com/projects/lydia-gifford-midday/

Midday. A Solo Exhibition by Lydia Gifford (27 Jan — 24 Mar 2012)

27 Jan — 24 Mar 2012

“Varying degrees of presence lead to different strengths of voice, tensions. The intimate is measured and restrained. A library of nuance is taken from a private studio activity, to a public site, a public moment. Halfway objects provide a starting point. Things come into being in their very utterance, emerging through the telling. I question which of my actions ‘hold’ their own, what can stay. Some insist, some withdraw. The work sits on the boundary of completion, where tenses co-exist.” Lydia Gifford, 2011

Lydia Gifford’s artistic research is an enquiry of the language and possibilities of painting, of painterly thought, which are subsequently allocated and transposed by means of subtle actions,  gestures, ideas and processes into a physical space. This activity, like a silent choreography, underpins ones reading of the  work. The exhibition is marked as a common-ground  where the works mutually create points of fragmentation and linger, in which they are to be activated and meaning is to be reinvented by the presence of the viewer.

For the DRAF, Gifford creates new in-situ installations in the gallery that prior to the opening reception, will become her studio, her testing ground, her stage and her mental space. With Gifford, the works are never detached from their context, they are on the contrary originated by the context as much as they create their own conditions of perception and sometimes production. Gifford investigates painting as a temporal attempt to visually crystallize a fragile moment of surfacing and its temporal indecision.

Lydia Gifford (b.1979, U.K) lives and works in London. This exhibition is curated by Vincent Honoré, director and curator, DRAF.

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http://www.laurabartlettgallery.com/exhibitions/lydia-gifford-manuela-leinhos/

For Lydia Gifford the structure behind painting and how it is arranged across the exhibition space seems as important as the painted image itself. While abstract, her paintings are tactile presences, standing their ground as real objects in the real world. She doesn’t just hang her paintings in the gallery; she infiltrates it, dividing and subdividing the otherwise empty space with painstakingly placed fragments. Surfaces are distressed, reworked, half-obliterated. Scrawl and scratch motifs escape their frames and start to deface the white cube ambience. It’s bold, sensuous and, despite its architectural scale, quite intimately haunting.