C4RD is pleased to present the work of Jerwood Prize winner Virginia Verran, which features her distinctive marker-on-canvas roundel works, as well as paintings that rely heavily on her drawing discoveries. Verran's drawing produces a new way of looking - demanding as it does of the spectator an attention to drawing history and its codes.
“Drawing allows a hot line to the nervous system, an immediacy not compounded by complex materials and layering. With regard to my own drawing there is a very direct connection with intuition and the ink in the pen is like a vein of mercury.
In it I have found new images, symbols and signs that relate to global fears and natural wonders and simple abstract invention. In this show I am making a direct connection between a previous (but recently worked on) large painting that contains a similar language of drawn marks that has been carried across from the drawings and back again into the paintings..a circular process.”
Virginia Verran
“Virginia Verran also uses a rondo format: the double series of circular drawings, Bolus-space and Bonner-space, are in part the result of the artist finding abandoned pieces of already-cut MDF. However, the works these random boards became are far from aleatory, being rather carefully – if intuitively and openly – composed...
Dense tracts of sharp, closely clustered imprints of ink delineate relatively immense zones of blankness, the exposed canvas contrasting acutely with the sheer mass of compacted marks... Zones of light grey and blue, pink and red, some yellows and greens screen out the void of the canvas, slip across it like clouds passing over a milky moon. Running through or over these flat but sinuous formations thin tracks of punctuated colour pulse or pause. The Bonner-space rondos are darker, denser, greatly layered, and arguably heavier and more brooding in their mood (witness the tiny faces, flags, bombs and outcrops of buildings that reside within these works).”
Peter Suchin; artist and critic, and regular contributor to Art Monthly and Frieze.
“the drawings fantasise... what is close to our reality of the world: its multiplicity, its multifariousness, its fugacious quickness and vividness. The simultaneity of the disparate images within the circle of the moment is crucial to this effect.
The circle also operates at the symbolic level: it is not a window, but an image of the cosmic and the unconfined. The eye moves round it: 'Life is probably round,' said Van Gogh; Gaston Bachelard said, 'The world is round around the round being.'
All of this refers of course to the symbolic nature of the work itself, nothing to do with any representational or symbolic element in the imagery. In fact, the 'signs and symbols' in the pictures seem to me to be without referents, free-floating, unattached constructs, detached from code.”
Mel Gooding
Please join us for for this exhibition at the reception 11 April 6-8pm or at the exhibition 12 April - 25 May 2013, Thursday - Saturday 1 - 6pm at 2 - 4 Highbury Station Road, Highbury Islington, London. C4RD is a Registered UK Charity 1123530, and would particularly like to acknowledge the support of ARTUPDATE.COM/ and our anonymous supporters.
Selected Biography
(b. Falmouth, UK)
Studied at Chelsea College of Art, London , MA (1983-84) and Winchester School of Art , BA (1980-83).
Solo shows:
C4RD, London 2013; Gallery Fine, London, 2000; Henie-Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo, 1999 ; Newlyn Gallery, Cornwall, 1997; Francis Graham-Dixon Gallery, 1989, 1991, 1993, 1995.
Selected group shows include:
Marmite Painting Prize, 2012/13 (touring Britain); First Come, First Served at Lion and Lamb, London, 2012/13; Collectible: ZAP art projects, London 2012; Royal Academy Summer Show, London 2012, Anschlussel : artists from Berlin and London, C4RD, London 2012, Equinox : Transition Gallery, London 2012; Drawing Biennial : The Drawing Room , London 2011; Anschlussel : artists from Berlin and London : Frueshorge Contemporary Drawings, Berlin 2011; Pulp Fictions : Transition Gallery, 2011 London; A Sort of Night To The Mind A Kind Of Night For Our Thoughts : Artery Gallery/ Arch 402, Stuttgardt 2011; Jerwood Drawing Prize, London 2010/11 (First Prize Winner), Jerwood Space and tour ; Drawings ; Wendy Anderson, Fieroza Dawson and Virginia Verran, Eagle Gallery, London, Sept 2010; Drawings : Lia Anna Hennig, Felicity Powell and Virginia Verran : Alexia Goethe Gallery, London 2010; Jerwood Drawing Prize, London 2009/10, Jerwood Space and tour; Same as it ever was, The Triangle Space, University Of the Arts (Chelsea), London 2008; Short Stories About Painting, Arts Space Gallery, London 2005; Gallery HOT, Osaka, Japan (2004); A21 International, Osaka, Japan 2004; British Abstract Art, Flowers Gallery, London (2001); Whitechapel Open, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 1994,1996,1998); John Moores 20, Walker Gallery, Liverpool (1997). Her work is held in public Collections: Arts Council of Great Britain (London) ; Barclays Capital (Dubai), Israel Phoenix Assurance (Israel); Arthur Anderson (London) ; Fitzwilliam Museum , Cambridge (loaned to Clare College); LG Collection (London); Meyer Brown, (London).
Currently Associate Lecturer at University of the Arts (Chelsea, London); University College Falmouth (Cornwall) and also teaches at Slade School of Art (London).
Centre for Recent Drawing
2-4 Highbury Station Road LONDON N1 1SB
02032396936 Charity No.1123530 Thu- Sat 1-6pm
Cuurent Exhibition: Virginia Verran
