HSoA Gallery | 'Forbidden Garden' Exhibition by Baroque Anarchist
Baroque Anarchist 2023 Catalogue
28 February - 15 April
Private View
Tues 7 March | 6 - 8.30pm
RSVP to info@hsoa.co.uk
Gallery Hours during term time -
Monday-Thursdays | 10am-7.30pm
Fridays | 10am-5.30pm
Saturdays | Gallery Closed
Sundays | 10am-4pm
During half term - By appointment only
Monday-Thursday | 10.30am-2.30pm
"I am delighted to be exhibiting the paintings of Baroque Anarchist.
The vitality and culture inherent with Anarchist is palpable. This series of works demonstrate a prolific and irrepressible presence, presenting us with luscious paintings of gigantic flowers, skulls- sticks and stones, the flotsam and jetsam of nature in luxuriously painted compositions.
A highly personal baroque style, intriguingly peppered with these elements of self-reference hidden amongst the magnetic beauty.
The classic definition of the Baroque comes to us from the Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin, whose “Principles of Art History” (1915) distinguished it from the earlier High Renaissance through a series of visual contrasts, “Renaissance pictures are “linear,” each figure outlined and balanced within the picture plane; Baroque pictures are “painterly.”
Anarchists work resonates with this description. A number of these artworks have that same dynamism with a particular and heightened visual contrast, sometimes a composition of undulating velvety reds and luscious blacks, they are as much a temperament as a style, theatrically colliding the visual with the emotional. Scaled up into wonderful dreamy forests, connecting extremes of light and shadow in one painting. Playing with visual illusions, creating rhythms that disrupt our expectations of logic, a botanic architecture which flows. Brilliant.
These grand painted works are both decorative and somehow structural. Lusciously described, going beyond the obvious, using references to the classical approach in a refreshingly personal way which brings back the century’s old tradition of Baroque art and so with this reinvention able to reflect and depict elements of our contrary times.
Intriguing titles such as ‘Thyroid Nest’ and references to the botanical intimacies of Georgia O’Keeffe, thematic yet somehow free, making skilled references beyond the formal echoes of light and shadow across classical themes of mythology, reinvented with elements of graffiti within compositions that underpin this very personal pondering.
This is exciting work and a much-needed tonic with its breathtaking realism, symbolic elements, and universal beauty."
Isabel H Langtry, Principal Hampstead School of Art
