LONDON.- Workplace Gallery is presenting Shadows and Mirrors an exhibition of new and recent work by Laura Lancaster.   

Laura Lancaster’s recent portraits of women both in silhouette and reflected in mirrors are paintings of ‘bad’ and ‘accidental’ pre-digital snapshot photographs collected by the artist.  Lancaster purposefully restages these throwaway images as powerful inversions of the male gaze. 

In the Shadow series her loose impasto brushwork pushes the figure towards abstraction. The figure and the surrounding scene begin to merge, whilst what remains of the subject stares down the viewer - the features of the face obscured by shadow. In her Mirror series Lancaster draws upon the historical theme of the Vanitas, and references the occult practice of Scrying - staring into a reflective surface in order to induce visions or revelation. In these paintings Lancaster depicts the figures as gazing into the mirror, locked in an ambiguous, unresolved moment of longing. 

Laura Lancaster was born in Hartlepool, UK in 1979. She lives and works in Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK. She has shown her work in exhibitions worldwide including Laura Lancaster, New Art Gallery Walsall; A Stranger's Dream, Sargent's Daughters, New York; Laura Lancaster, Wooson Gallery, Korea. Dismaland, curated by Banksy, Weston-super- Mare, UK; Private Utopia, Tokyo Station Gallery, Japan; Museum of Art, Kochi, Japan; Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland; Museum of Modern Art St Etienne; Glasgow International; October - Salon, Belgrade, Palazzo Della Arte, Napoli; Accademia d'Ungheria a Roma; John Moores Prize, Liverpool, UK. Lancaster's work is represented in numerous international collections including The British Council Collection; New Art Gallery, Walsall, UK; The Government Art Collection, UK and numerous private collections worldwide. Her work has recently been published in Vitamin P3: New Perspectives in Painting by Phaidon Press, and Picturing People by Charlotte Mullins for Thames and Hudson.