Studio Voltaire launches new editions by Anna Weyant, Lubna Chowdhary, Jake Grewal, Mary Stephenson and Christina Kimeze for Frieze London.
Anna Weyant has created her first-ever limited edition cashmere blanket featuring a still-life composition of party balloons, shiny ribbons and plump-linked sausage. Particular yarn colors have been selected to evoke the feeling of her graphite drawings.
Whether portraits, figures or precisely rendered still-lifes, Weyant employs ironic wit to illustrate playful contradictions in her work. Her scenes offer a dreamlike insight into the capacity of popular culture and social convention to manufacture and distort gestures and rituals.
In this new edition Lubna Chowdary has created two richly glazed ceramic pieces which are intended to be displayed together, propped up side by side or overlapping. These colourful and exquisitely executed works are sold in a special presentation box.
Chowdhary is highly acclaimed for her ceramic works, which subvert the traditional context and utility of the medium to address a longstanding preoccupation with urbanisation and material culture. Her sculptural practice has evolved from a sustained fascination with the fusion of binary cultural and artistic influences.
Jake Grewal has produced a series of two original fine art etchings exclusive to House of Voltaire working closely with a leading London print studio. Both editions feature figures within an unknown landscape. The combination of sepia tones and size of the edition recalls historic photographic image-making, further adding to the sense of layers of memories and experiences. Grewal’s figures appear at once in harmonious cohabitation with their natural surroundings. They are seemingly on the verge of being consumed by them, an ambiguity that imbues his works with an atmosphere of quiet uncertainty and longing.
Jake Grewal is a London-based artist known for his painting and drawing practice which explores the male nude and natural world through a queer gaze. His works have a dreamlike quality, expressing widely felt yet intimate, emotional themes.
Mary Stephenson is a London-based artist known for atmospheric paintings which explore interior and exterior landscapes to evoke varying psychological states.
In this new print edition, the artist has reproduced a new painting which features a stark landscape in dusty pink hues. Although the figure is absent from the picture plane, human presence is implied throughout the artist’s work with a sense of longing and loss.
Christina Kimeze is a London-based painter whose work often explores the inner lives of female protagonists. The artist’s scenes consist primarily of lone figures, either static or moving through the home: submerged in the bath, ambling down the stairs or perched in the garden. It is not loneliness that Kimeze focuses on, but the ‘agency’ of being alone. In her words,
“You can just choose to be sitting with yourself.”
For this new edition, Kimeze has worked closely with a leading London print studio specialising in etching to produce an original fine art etching. It features the head and shoulders of a female protagonist peering out at the bottom corner of an almost dream-like picture frame of fluid natural forms.
All works are exclusive to House of Voltaire and are available to purchase at houseofvoltaire.org with worldwide shipping, and Allied Editions at Frieze art fair.
