LONDON.- Lazarides is presenting Internal Dialogue, a new series of works by American contemporary artist and BP Portrait Award 2016 exhibiting artist Brett Amory.
Corresponding with his critically acclaimed ‘Waiting’ series, the works in Internal Dialogue are concerned with everyday life, places, and people, yet this new body of work explores the time in which we live and how we make sense of the information that surrounds us.
Internal Dialogue explores the disjointed snapshots that make up our everyday life, and how our unconscious mind assembles these abstract, nonlinear events to attempt to fuse together a logical, linear explanation of our surroundings.
This new series of works is also concerned with the human habit of viewing the world through screens. People in today’s society are attached to their devices; we view the world through our phones, our TVs, our computers, and complete the gaps of the surrounding world through our unconscious mind, as if what we see now is framed by what the world looks like on screen.
With each painting in Internal Dialogue, Amory allows the viewer to tap his or her unconscious mind to create their own meaning of what they are viewing. The viewer will be able to rely on their own memories, dreams, thoughts and universal archetypal symbols to create their own interpretation of the painting.
In the same week as his exhibition at Lazarides Rathbone, Brett Amory’s work for the prestigious BP Portrait Award will be unveiled at The National Portrait Gallery. His entry, selected out of 2,557 competing artists, will be one of 53 works shown at the iconic art institution from 23 June – 4 September 2016. Amory has also been shortlisted for the BP Travel Grant.
Brett Amory’s atmospheric, expressionist paintings of “average Joes” make him an L. S. Lowry for the globalised era. Born in Chesapeake, Virginia in 1975, Brett Amory currently lives and works in California.
Brett entered into formal art training in his late 20s. Always entertained by his own amateur artistic experiments, he enrolled at San Francisco’s Academy of Arts. “It was a vocational establishment and my technique was poor”, he says. “I was told to take additional workshops, where I discovered a subculture of hard-working students whose industriousness spurred me on. As my technique grew stronger and my art knowledge expanded, I realised the art world cared more about emotion and concept than realism.”
Amory often spends months researching and observing commonplace situations before creating his works; his previous exhibition Twenty-Four In London involved the California-based artist taking in the length and breadth of the nation’s capital by bicycle and documenting over forty locations, with more than fifty hours of video and hundreds of photos at each place.
