Venue
Oceans Apart
Starts
Friday, June 25, 2021
Ends
Sunday, July 25, 2021
Address
OA Studios 24-26 King Street Salford M3 7DG
Location
North West England
Organiser
Oceans Apart

STAND CLOSE AND BREATHE ME IN

25th June to 25th July 2021

​Stand Close and Breathe Me In is a group exhibition of paintings which explores the collective spirit of small scale imagery within the context of a painting-viewer relationship.

​These paintings draw you in. They initiate an intimate response and engage the viewer in the act of looking. They arrest us at close quarters via the smallest of painterly activities and devices.

Each painting punctuates the next and radiates into the space and into each other. They converse and mingle, sending out messages like invisible rays. They enter the body through the eyes and remain there as propositions, questions and after-images.

​These paintings remind us that ‘size isn’t everything’. Up close, we’re able to scrutinise content and the manner in which the paintings were made. We experience the surface as a consequence of process, feeling each painting’s meaning through its distinctive mode of making.

​At a distance, we witness the bigger picture, where the paintings converse silently at arms length, collaborating as dots and dashes and through repetition and strength in numbers. Approaching these paintings they begin to reveal and conceal themselves simultaneously. Clarity is administered in their obscurity and abstraction before we back away to achieve a sense of perspective in the collective.

​Exhibiting artists:

Julian Brown, Kena Brown, Ruth Calland, Andrew Crane, Jeff Dellow, Lisa Denyer, Rosalind Faram, Susie Hamilton, Alex Hanna, David Lock, David Manley, Enzo Marra, Gideon Pain, Alison Pilkington, James Quin, Dan Samuel Thomas, Katie Trick, Rhys Trussler, Grant Watson, Lily-Ella Westacott, Casper White, Dylan Williams​

Curated by Enzo Marra, in conjunction with Contemporary British Painting