LONDON.- This September Freelands Foundation opened a group exhibition of emerging painters from UK art schools.

The exhibition provides a vital platform for eight upcoming artists to present their work in a central London location to coincide with Frieze London. Look showcases artists who are pushing the boundaries of paint and celebrates the diversity of approaches to the medium in contemporary practice.

Look presents the work of eight recent UK art school graduates, who have been nominated by their BA and MA Fine Art and Painting courses, at the institutions of Bath School of Art & Design, University of Brighton, Kingston School of Art, Manchester School of Art, Plymouth College of Art, and Wolverhampton School of Art, alongside graduates from a selection of alternative art schools, comprising of The Essential School of Painting and Turps Art School.

The exhibition is a direct result of conversations Freelands Foundation has been having with art schools over the past year, investigating the approaches taken today in the teaching and learning of painting.

Despite a proliferation of new ways of making art, and an explosion in the ways artists operate, painting continues to be a vital part of the conversation in contemporary art practice. Painting has survived the many proclamations of its demise, from the invention of photography in the 1830s, when French artist Paul Delaroche apparently exclaimed ‘from today, painting is dead’, through the numerous revolutions and evolutions of the last century, to the digital age of today.

The exhibition features artists who have recently graduated from a range of courses; four having been chosen after completing BAs, comprising of Caitlin Doherty (Wolverhampton School of Art), Julius Griffin (Kingston School of Art), Holly Nicholls (Bath School of Art & Design), Maddalena Zadra (University of Brighton). Cassandra Brooks (Plymouth College of Art) and Jenny Eden (Manchester School of Art) graduated with MAs. Tom Rapsey completed the Turps Studio Programme at Turps Art School and Josh Uvieghara completed The Bigger Picture course with artist Bob & Roberta Smith at The Essential School of Painting.

Cassandra Brooks
Cassandra Brooks Completed an MA in Painting at Plymouth College of Art. Her work proposes a correlation between the absurdity of the clown and the absurdity of painting. Brooks explores the clown as a representation of an alter ego, subverting socially constructed notions of identity, through the use of paint, colour and movement.

Caitlin Doherty
Caitlin Doherty graduated with a BA in Fine Art at Wolverhampton School of Art. Doherty’s work interrogates and challenges the representation of the female form. The artist’s larger than life, figurative clay and charcoal paintings question the pop culture of western societies, which influence how women should look and behave. Doherty’s paintings represent images of bodies that have been alienated from and unrepresented in mainstream society.

Jenny Eden
Jenny Eden studied an MFA in Fine Art and is now a Practice PhD student in Fine Art Painting at Manchester School of Art. Eden’s paintings are driven by process and the dynamics involved in the painter–painting relationship. Starting from a position of paintings as living things, capable of having an important role in their own development, the work is made through the oscillating and sought-after states of having knowledge and being uncertain. Colour is also a principal concern within Eden’s process and it encourages the motifs in her paintings to sit between non-representation and representation, making associations to both external material objects and the reality of paint matter on a flat surface.

Julius Griffin
Julius Griffin graduated from Kingston School of Art with a BA in Fine Art. His works hinge on an element of comic relief and relies on an attitude of playfulness. Griffin is inspired by images that provoke a sense of provincialism that is already present in our towns and cities: welcome signs, football club emblems and the stationary static of the day-to-day. Griffin considers the world through the frame of canvas and paint but aims to reanimate his content into a propaganda vision, an impossible utopia that shows the inevitability of conflated meanings, the creeping in of imagination and dispersion of static ideas when harking back and seeking something solid.

Holly Nicholls
Holly Nicholls graduated with a BA in Fine Art from the Bath School of Art & Design. Nicholl’s current practice is based on an interest in pointing to the external world, working with oils on large-scale panels, exploring the relationships between edges, boundaries and gesture that exist both in nature and in the act of painting. Within her work she is reimagining, through paint, a moment in time and place. She currently creates works using the application of four different paints on to the surface of the canvas, which are all concerned with saturation, colour and transparency, with an emphasis on materiality and the momentary.

Tom Rapsey
Tom Rapsey completed the Turps Studio Programme at Turps Art School. Rapsey creates sculptural paintings that appear as large, lumpy objects with holes in them. The works are sculptures in the sense that they sit of the wall plane – but to Rapsey, they are all about surface, built up like paintings, they are only ready when the object’s skin is complete and starts to crawl. These objects are made with much care and consideration, as if future generations relied upon them being just so – yet they appear to serve no purpose beyond the expression of a desire to be seen.

Josh Uvieghara
Josh Uvieghara graduated from The Essential School of Painting, completing The Bigger Picture course with artist Bob & Roberta Smith. The theme of music is significant to his works, in the way that they offer the possibility of transporting the mind to a place that is ostensibly familiar and other at the same time. Uvieghara is interested in the notion of how walls can be material or immaterial depending on the situation or perceptual point of view. For example, a wall of sound is a musical recording technique, but it also reminds him of experiences in his teens; of walking through particular streets in Ladbroke Grove during the Notting Hill Carnival and literally being surrounded by walls of speakers.

Maddalena Zadra
Maddalena Zadra completed a BA in Fine Art Painting at University of Brighton. Zadra’s interest is in the pleasure of reading and hearing stories that make you smile when you are trying to visualise them in your head. The figurative narrative of her work has the effect of allowing the viewer to float around a simple range of symbols that spread across the canvas, hiding and revealing stories in turn. This experience becomes a journey through images and visual metaphors that builds upon the literary, including fairy tales, myth and memoir. The works offer a veiled critique of the archetypal female form in a humorous and playful way. The figurative element is created by the technique of mono-printing, which is a quick and direct process and when used on canvas, produces a raw surface quality.