TAKING SHAPE 27 July - 1 August 2021 Private View*: Friday 30 July 5-9pm
A group exhibition of multi disciplinary Artists creating work through paint, ink, text, video and sculpture.
An exhibition that speaks of an obsessive relationship to our immediate landscapes, and the artists’ compulsion to record. The artwork takes familiar scenes and banal realities that have become ritualistic over the past year, to project an alternative, imagined way of living and being.
Felix Allen Melanie Christine Amengual Louisa Clark Rachel Lonsdale Tom Mead George Spencer Jackson Sarah-Athina Nahas
Claudio Pestana: Fag Attacks the Country 3-8 August 2021
“Like a fairy tale, it all started once upon a time – this time in 2020 with the birth of a new world order of ecological dystopia. The woods were quiet, the cows grazed undisturbed, the genteel went about attending to their lawns and vegetable patches, the crows, always suspicious, scanned the rolling hills, when suddenly an evil foreign nonbinary Queen arrived in the scene.”
In ‘Fag Attacks the Country’, Claudio Pestana’s first solo exhibition, we are presented with an imaginary Queer space in the English countryside. In this series of paintings, completed during lockdown, Pestana subverts the tradition of the ‘conversation piece’, the eighteenth-century sub-genre of portraiture, which at the time was profitably mastered by the likes of Gainsborough, Devis, and Zoffany. In ‘Fag Attacks the Country’ Pestana challenges the symbolic capital historically attached to the genre and creates an antithesis to the traditional decorum that was obligatorily depicted in the 18th century and beyond.
“During lockdown, whilst social distancing in the depths of Dorset’s countryside, I started thinking about how, as a non-binary foreign person, I fitted into the landscape of the county with its specific social topography. Surrounded by traditional and conservative cultural markers, I started reflecting on the symbolic power that those around me held.
‘Fag Attacks the Country’ explores the intersection between (my) Queerness, the rural, and the tradition of portraiture and landscape painting. The paintings started as a spontaneous gesture that arose after I suddenly became aware of how my Queerness might be perceived in the rural community where I was living. I started feeling a rebellious and subversive energy arising in me, which led me to create an imaginary rural world where I arrived as a Fag (I consciously adopt this term as a way of hijacking the language of the abuser) and affronted the status quo of those who commanded social power.
Claudio Pestana was born in Portugal in 1974, and lives and works between London and Dorset, England. First trained as a psychologist, Pestana also engaged in art making as a self-taught artist before receiving his MA in Fine Art Painting from Camberwell College Pestana has collaborated with other artists on several art projects and in 2020 his work was included in the London Grads Now exhibition at The Saatchi Gallery in London. In 2021 Pestana was awarded the Abbey Scholarship in Painting 2021-22 with a residency at The British School at Rome.
