Shila Khatami and Daniel Sturgis

Two person exhibition created by Shila Khatami (Berlin) and Daniel Sturgis (London)

By bringing together and combining references from art, contemporary culture, abstraction and design, Daniel Sturgis’s paintings recognise abstract painting’s contested relationship to the contemporary world. Resolutely two-dimensional, and often visually up-beat, these are paradoxical paintings that reflect on the act of making, the legacies of modernist painting, and the present-day.

Carefully hand-crafted in flat acrylic paint, Sturgis’s canvases use hard-edged abstraction as an arena to question the assumptions and exclusivity of abstraction. His paintings allow order and difference to happily coalesce. By interweaving ideas of opticality, movement and visual balance, Sturgis creates both formal and comic tensions. Through the use of small, coloured dots, visual layering, or by forms being representationally suggestive, these works contain strong anthropomorphic qualities. Shapes become sentient, and a visual and theoretical instability is implied.

Sturgis chose paintings from the series of Studied Abandon (2021), recognising what he describes as ‘a slight urbanism and toughness’ in their colours and graphic, layered, compositions to be in dialogue with work by Shila Khatami.

The interweaving of art within society is a central theme of Khatami's work. She examines the abstract vocabulary in urban space and its references to art history. She then translates these iterations of painting, back into an artistic context.

The materials and the accompanying color palette refer back to the real life, non-artistic applications of these forms, such as a paint bomb or road damage lines.

Loose gestures counteract the rigid geometric construction. The variety of painting in Khatami's works can be understood as a meta commentary on painting.

In doing so, she is interested in questions immanent to the picture such as, “What is a picture?;” “How does a picture come into being?” and "From what does a picture originate?"

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