Private View 6.30pm – 8.30pm Tuesday 16th July 2013 The Truscott Arms, 55 Shirland Road, Maida Vale, London W9 2JD
Nina Fowler’s practice focuses on idolatry, icons and fame. The imagery used is primarily 1930’s and 1940’s Hollywood, yet the themes are as contemporary as ever. Exploring our all-consuming desire for fame and our lust for stardom (and stars), Fowler breaks down the façade to reveal the dark side of celebrity. Using traditional methods (including drawing, bas relief, etching and sculpture) the images are ambiguous and contradictory, juxtaposing beauty and glamour with violence and desperation. Are these people crying or laughing, dancing or fighting? Compositionally the images are highly taught – film stills and found images are manipulated to heighten the drama – and a sense of trauma, danger and paranoia permeates everything.
Fowler’s work sits on the boundary between drawing and sculpture. Indeed, Fowler seems to almost sculpt her drawings, often leaving them to hang on eyelets, or draping them around gallery interiors, so that one interacts with them physically as objects, as much as metaphorically as images. Likewise her sculptures take on a two-dimensional aspect: seen from one angle, they are perfect; move away from that angle and the work breaks down and dissolves into unformed abstraction. Posing in front of the pictures in which they feature, these sculptures raise questions about depiction and truth, reality and illusion.
Fowler likes to fabricate her own frames, which in turn become an integral part of the work itself, their unusual theatrical shapes seeming to evoke cinema facades or stage sets. Drawn to texture and the materiality of things, she elevates humble or prosaic materials, seizing on the sparkle of industrial flooring to create a gorgeous casing. Such blurrings (high and low, real and unreal, 2D and 3D) seem emblematic of the unreality of stardom, and provide the contradictions in which the artist clearly takes such delight.
Amongst the works exhibited at the Truscott Arms is Tracings, a new collection of prints. In a characteristic inversion of order, the unconscious scrawl of tracing transfers becomes art itself. These marks, created for the purpose of transferring an image, are stripped of their function and presented purely for aesthetics. Surprisingly violent, they show faces with flesh seemingly holed out; scribbles become scars, and mouths gape open as if in some gruesome horror movie.
Nina Fowler graduated with a first in sculpture from Brighton University in 2003. In 2008, she was nominated for the BP Portrait Prize and in 2010 her work was shortlisted for the Jerwood Drawing Prize. More recently she was shortlisted for The Young Masters Prize 2012. Her work is admired and collected by British film, music and fashion luminaries such as John Maybury, Jude Law, Sharleen Spiteri and Caroline Issa. She is included in private and public collections in Europe and the USA and is represented in France by Galerie Dukan. Forthcoming exhibitions include shows at Neuer Kunstverein Aschaffenburg, Germany, and Cob Gallery, London.
