LONDON.- At DKUK Clare Price’s large paintings envelop the salon, while the sensual spaces within the work are made manifest on a new kind of canvas.

Clare’s paintings investigate the sensuousness of making, the interaction with the body in the studio and the palpable “stuff” of paint, which freezes the hidden performance – traces and residues of moments are captured like photographic exposures. In the paintings voluptuous gestural elements are set against translucent geometric planes. These shapes, drawn from modernist forms and digital tools, “pin” spilled vistas creating ambiguous spaces. Clare uses colours that range from a muted palette of wet stains that refer to the body, to smears of neon that talk of the digital and rave. Visceral oil paint is used in hues that draw from classical painting and abstract expressionism; the colours are bodily, fragile and at times intense and darkly lush.

Replicating the hidden performance of the studio, Clare will spend two days working with hair models, drawing on the palette of her paintings to create one-off colour creations at DKUK, using L’Oreal’s Colourful Hair range of dyes. As in the creation of her paintings, this performance will only exist through the traces that it leaves behind; the hair colour on the models, and through photographic documentation that extends the exhibition online, produced in collaboration with photographer Benjamin Whitley. These images will function in symbiosis with the works at DKUK and reach further into Clare’s own investigations into performance and photography in relation to her practice.

Clare Price completed her MFA Fine Art at Goldsmiths in 2016. Recent exhibitions include c.m. at Galeria Bacelos in Madrid, exhibitions at Oriel Davies in Wales and TAP Gallery in Southend and at Studio 1.1 and the Peckham Safehouses in London. Clare has been the recipient of the Goldsmiths Jealous Print Prize, the winner of the Oriel Davies Open 2016, Painting Student Prize and the Acme Jessica Wilkes Award. Clare recently took part in ‘Women of Abstract Expressionism’, a panel discussion at the Royal Academy to accompany the exhibition ‘Abstract Expressionism’.

DKUK has been operating in Peckham for two years. At DKUK paying clients get their hair cut in front of art. Realised by artist/hairdresser Daniel Kelly, DKUK provides a platform for engaging diverse audiences with contemporary art in the welcoming environment of a hairdressing salon.