GL BRIERLEY | THE IMPOSSIBLE HEAP

(openPR) SEP 17 – OCT 24, 2015
OPENING: SEP 16, 2015, 7 PM

FELDBUSCHWIESNER is pleased to present the second solo show of British painter GL Brierley at the
gallery. GL Brierley (*1965, UK) completed her Masters in visual arts at Royal College of Art in London and graduated with an M.F.A. from Goldsmith College, London, in 2007. Her works are presented in renowned collections, such as the Murderme collection (of Damien Hirst) London, Olbricht Collection, Düsseldorf, Collection Thomas Rusche and Collection Reydan Weiss, Germany. The artist lives and works in London.

In her new works, GL Brierley is inspired by the textual and visual world of the theatre; she creates haunting, intimate and monumental compositions in oil, reminiscent of the dramatic installation of a stage set. It is particularly the plays of Samuel Beckett that have inspired the interior two-character paintings with their psychologically claustrophobic constellation of the inescapable relationship.

In Beckett’s play Endgame, two characters are locked in a co-dependent relationship with a sense of repetitive stasis. One character counts out rice, each individual grain never quite making a heap. In the same way, an existence made up of single moments never quite makes a whole life until the end.
In the artist’s paintings, the characters are forever locked in stasis, and all the viewer can do is gaze upon that embedded dynamic.

The spaces of the theatre are always temporary – GL Brierley condenses their atmosphere in masterly gestures carrying the feel of art historical still lifes; in multiple layers that accumulate over time, the artist builds an archeology of painting itself. Her subjects float and interact on stages and in displays, which structure the indomitable and fluid quality of the paint. As ambivalent and enigmatic objects and beings, they oscillate between abstraction and figuration, seduction and the grotesque.

The paint drips, congeals, wrinkles and seemingly reacts alchemically, in a unique materiality and a virtuosic use of light. In GL Brierley’s works, oil paint becomes alive; it takes on the role of a powerful independent agent of the pictorial design.

The intimate and complex relationship of human and object, the dialogue between artist and canvas, possession and longing – her works reflect conflicting aspects of the self, manifested in paint; thus, each fold and layer of paint is emotionally charged.