William Turner Gallery debuts two concurrent solo exhibitions showing works by Simon Birch and Lawrence Gipe. A reception was held on August 6, 2022 for both exhibitions. They will remain on view through September 17, 2022. Remember to check with the gallery for up-to-date covid protocols and guidelines – (proof of vaccination and masks MAY be required).

Simon Birch, Shutdown Danger Pink, 2019, oil on canvas, 200 x 200 cm / 78.7″ x 78.7”

“Simon Birch: Ignite 14 – Recent Paintings” is presented in collaboration with GuY Hector (The Art House Global). In this series of portraits, the British-born, Hong Kong-based artist  materializes enigmatic, ectoplasmic figures in his psychologically charged canvases linking sympathies between external forces and interior emotion. These large-scale renderings of figures in motion – are torn between attraction and repulsion as they twist and tumble through space. Birch delves into allegorical states of the human condition through his painterly poetics of cleaved color blocks disrupted with loose, painterly, gestural strokes. Intent on the inward, only vestiges of the external linger with allusions to what Hamlet described as, “the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.”

Lawrence Gipe’s “Recent Pictures” draws from ongoing work addressing themes of progress, industrialization and the environment. Two of the works are culled from the Russian Drone Paintings. This is Gipe’s latest series which employs the visual style of “Manifest Destiny” canvasses of the 19th Century, in a reference to the Industrial Revolution – the historical origin of all our ecological peril. The image sources are contemporary, based on screenshots of drone footage posted on the now-censored RT news service run by the Russian government. The Russian Drone Paintings engage issues like surveillance, climate change, and the Anthropocene, seen through the lens of our global “adversary,” in images of cities abandoned to radioactivity, bombardments, and other traumatic evidence of humanity’s relentless intervention into Nature.

On view: August 6 – September 17, 2022

What: New exhibitions, Simon Birch, Lawrence Gipe
Where: William Turner Gallery, E1, Bergamot 2525 Michigan Ave., SM, 90404
Website: http://williamturnergallery.com/