JARILAGER Gallery presents no-man's-land, a solo exhibition featuring new paintings from British contemporary artist Kim Booker. Booker's practice has roots in the tradition of modern painting and expressionism, yet imposes a stubbornly personal, uniquely female point of view on art history and a painterly language of gestural abstraction combined with figurative drawing. Her art is a compassionate celebration of the power of self-exploration, solitude and femininity.
The exhibition title, no-man's-land, is deliberately multi-layered. On the one hand, it mirrors the artist's craving for freedom. Booker's creative cave is an area of unowned, unclaimed, solitary land. Her paintings are about coming to terms with internal and external struggles, trauma and release, and allowing those things to happen in a safe, unperturbed space. On the other hand, Booker embraces painting as a way of reclaiming a male dominated tradition for herself as a female artist. Literally speaking, no-man's-land means that only women are invited to occupy and inhabit her artworks.
These paintings feature dramatically expressive, oneirically inaccurate self-portrait-silhouettes lying at the bottom of the canvases or standing loosely in the middle of the scene, trying to get closer with each other. There are palpable feelings of broken connection and physical isolation. Booker's main theme, without any doubt, is the intimacy which women experience when they are left alone, with nobody watching them and when they don't have to watch themselves either. Instead, her figures are free to be in themselves.
Booker's technique incorporates materials such as spray paint and glitter alongside acrylic and graphite, representing a newly found freedom in terms of materiality. Furthermore, for the first time, she includes pictorial imagery and symbolism; former figures existed within abstract spaces with no recognisable real-world imagery, whereas the women in these paintings inhabit imaginary mountainous landscapes. In a way, she appropriates the symbol of the mountain and turns it into a feminist one: mountains are the goal to reach, something to climb or to be overcome, something to become one with.
'Painting can feel like climbing a mountain too, one foot at a time.'
Press release courtesy JARILAGER Gallery.
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