An Intimate Distance |Rabley Gallery

EXHIBITION

An Intimate Distance – Craigie Aitchison RA, Eileen Cooper RA, Natasha Michaels and Jo Taylor

15 April – 29 May 2021

Please book before visiting the gallery

‘An Intimate Distance’ is a side view of contemporary portraiture. It brings together portraits where the relationship between the sitter and the artist has been forged, and invented portraits, where the imagination of the artist has given new agency and form to previous incarnations.

Craigie Aitchison (1926–2009) is well known for his colourful, stylised paintings. This ‘Portrait of Naaotwa with Green Earring’, 2006 shares its rose bengal background with the light of the room and curiously, though intense, enhances the subtle skin tones of Naaotwa, one of his favourite models.

Eileen Cooper has recently returned to drawing and painting from life. In this collection are two very different male subjects, Ziggy and Archie, both Royal Academy alumni. There is a tenderness in the handling of materials in both.

Natasha Michaels originally trained as an illustrator at the Royal College of Art. The origins of her recent monoprints lie in historical portraits from the renaissance to the 19th century. Exploring challenging, and at times, up-ending traditional conventions and genres.

Jo Taylor, through her medium of Ceramics, crosses the boundary from likeness abstract form creating new vessels in porcelain that appropriate Sevre porcelain from the 18th Century. Each is a contemporary reinterpretation of this elegant high-shouldered, voluptuous shape. They strike impolite conversations with the material, challenging them into new articulations.