Being Human...and Some Dogs: Philippa Paterson

Private View 

Saturday 2nd September  1 - 4pm 

Join Philippa Paterson at the gallery for a glass of wine and discuss these wonderfully joyous 

vibrant paintings, directly with the artist - all welcome

Darl-e and the Bear are delighted to host Philippa Paterson’s first solo show.

This exhibition of remarkable new works embodies Paterson's joy of life, colour, her extensive experience of living and travelling abroad, family, and her take on modern life with a nod to the decadence of the past.

Philippa Paterson’s paintings are composed of the traditional elements, portrait and landscape, 

oil paint on canvas or linen and at first glance there is a seemingly traditional approach to her subject matter, ‘people, pets and interiors, vases of flowers and sofas’ set in scenes of domestic life that would have been familiar with a C19th lady painter. 

But as her current exhibition 'Being Human . . . and some dogs’ reveals, things in Paterson’s painted world quickly and gloriously begin to slide. The familiar elements of domesticity are present but have become untethered from the pictorial frame, cosy domesticity is further pushed aside by unexpected imagery. We encounter an improbably curvaceous and scantily clad lady trapeze artist flying overhead, attended by a cast of suspicious-looking men in scenes reminiscent of George Grosz in Weimar Berlin. Next a 1920’s barroom scene springs up, painted in a style reminiscent of Philip Guston and traditional elements are further disrupted as solid pictorial space seems to have been considered, then rejected as perspective goes merrily haywire. Paint dances across the canvases in brilliant colours, sometimes thick and clotted, almost abstract, then turned layered, thin and convincing representational, creating an exciting surface texture. Paterson’s compositions invite us into a ‘spacial’ experience, throughout which a strong sense of narrative pervades. There is a feeling of a story being told in almost every picture, but this story is never explained, rather the images unfold as a series of contemporary fantasies, charged with an unpredictable energy and full of the mystery of human life.