The latest body of work from Francesca Lowe, entitled Headland: Women in a Landscape will be on display at Soho’s Riflemaker gallery from tonight, May 23rd.
Francesca Lowe, Tree-Cuts
Best known for surreal and monumental pastiches in oil and acrylic, Francesca Lowe’s work explores issues of gender and female identity, through the lenses of voyeurism, metaphor and myth. Headland: Woman in a Landscape draws together diverse works, both paintings and intricate paper cuts. Born of an enduring preoccupation with the metaphoric and the mythic, the exhibition is a foray into ancient mythology, producing visual and typographic records of Francesca’s exploration of the cultural resonances of the tree of life and the three graces myth.
The Tree Canvasses – Grace, Abundance and Inertia – are epically proportioned paintings which reappropriate the stories of the three Graces to track the metaphorical lanscape that acts as road map to a woman’s life journey. Each branch, named after a painting in the series, presents symbolic choices, their connotations and consequences. The result is a map of images and symbols which flow from place to place. Depicted in some dazzling fresco wash colours, they echo the details of a Victorian mural and totally transform the three-story Riflemaker gallery.
Where the large canvasses explore wider governing metaphors, the intricate Tree-Cuts are concerned with personal geography and self-improvement. They have been created by cutting into a complete, already-published book, and therefore perform a retrograde movement where the paper is returned to its original form.
Until 2nd July 2011, http://www.riflemaker.org/
