Blue Shop Gallery returns for a 4th time to the brilliant Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair bringing original unique works of painterly print by Liorah Tchiprout, Sammi Lynch, Greg Stevens, Ines Fernandez de Cordova, Cameron Mowat, Ollie Marr, Ned Elliott and Katy Papineau. From 21 - 24 November 2024 we’ll be joining over 500 independent artists, famous names and specialist galleries at Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair, the UK’s largest celebration of contemporary print.

Sam Douglas (b.1978) is a contemporary British painter born in Somerset. Douglas graduated from the Royal College of art in 2007 and has exhibited internationally including Japan, China, Poland, Switzerland, Norway and Berlin, with solo exhibitions in Arles, London, Dublin and Edinburgh. During this time he has been selected for the John Moores painting prize and has been on numerous residencies.

Roy Aurinko (b.1972) lives and works in Heinola, Finland. He graduated as a Master of Arts from the University of Lapland in 2007. Aurinko's abstract paintings incorporate elements of drawing, and are created using a mixed-media technique combining oil, acrylic, pastel and cement. The work process and the feel of the material are present in Aurinko’s works. Often channelling childhood memories, Aurinko’s works aestheticise this subject, evoking emotions ranging from nostalgia to environmental responsibility.

Tom Robinson (b.1979) lives in Norfolk, England. Robinson’s latest show ‘Rising (and falling)’ continues the artist’s longstanding fascination with paintings as visceral, bodily experiences. Robinson emphasises our experience of the fundamental components of painting – colour and shape – as individual forces. To look at his paintings is to experience the lively relation between each of these component forces, as, in the artist’s words, they ‘jump, run and slide’ into each other to amount to something vibrant and animated, at once harmonious and dissonant.

‘In Absentia’ gathers work depicting inhabited spaces absent of the human figure. This absence allows an unnoticed corridor, street corner or garden to become the painting’s proper subject. By paying close attention to these backdrops of human activity, the works in this show evoke the way memory and association become powerfully integrated into the environments we once occupied, or continue to do so. Perhaps it is the pervasive sense of memory across this show that entails the dreamlike quality to so many of the images on display. They often feel at once the faithful rendering of a particular place, as well as an evocation of a deeply familiar, personal scene.

Roya Bahram (b.1998) is a British-Iranian sculptor based in London. She is a classically trained stone carver, with a BA from City and Guilds of London Art School in Historic and Architectural Stone Carving, and a foundation degree in Fine Art from Working Men's College. Working primarily in marble and semiprecious stones, Bahram creates playful trompe l’œil sculptures with a focus on enhancing the textures and colours that naturally occur within the stone, whilst simultaneously challenging the rigid nature of the material, turning blocks of solid stone into gloopy, squishy, and gelatinous still-life sculptures inspired by pop art and the mundane.

Salvatore (b.1976) is a painter based in Hackney, East London. He was born in Cardiff, Wales, to an Italian father and British mother. After spending his early childhood in the Canary Islands and the Caribbean, he returned to the UK in the mid 1980s. He completed his BA in Birmingham in 1998 and MA in painting at the Royal College of Art in 2000. Salvatore’s work explores peripheries within the landscape, reoccurring motifs such as fences, trees/foliage and windows act as both boundaries and portals, offering suggestions of what might be happening beyond the frame or behind what is visible.

Ceramic artist Rosa Nguyen (b.1960) is of French Vietnamese parentage and was born in London. She gained a BA in 3D Design at Middlesex Polytechnic and an MA in ceramics from the Royal College of Art in 1986. She lives and works between London and the South-West of France where she has established a studio and a garden. Rosa Nguyen is a close neighbour of Blue Shop Gallery and her studio in Camberwell neighbours Blue Shop Cottage close to Camberwell College Of Art where she taught 1996-2010 on the celebrated ceramic course.

Olly Fathers (b.1987) is an artist based in Brixton, London. His work explores the relations between abstract shapes, different materials, and forms. Creating well finished, often playful pieces that encourage the viewer to take a closer look to understand the balance and precision involved. With a strict eye for detail, Fathers takes great satisfaction in the making process and this often becomes influential in the outcome of his work.

Kaja is a Norwegian artist living and working in London. Stumpf’s recent work examines memory, self-representation, and the mind-body connection. She explores the idea of selective memory and cognitive bias as a means of self-preservation, and through painting, visualises the rumination of potential scenarios between past and present. Utilising staged images and the photographic family archive, she crops the scene and alter the colours to create a sense of delayed familiarity.

Vivien McDermid (b. 1981) is a painter based in Edinburgh, Scotland. She graduated with a degree in fashion from Edinburgh College of Art in 2005 and began to paint after the birth of her first child in 2007. In recent years she has exhibited in group and duo exhibitions but ‘Burnt Milk & Honey’ is her first solo show. She describes painting as the language in which she feels she can most fluently communicate and untangle the experiences of being human. For her, the act of painting is a continual strengthening of the bridge which joins the inner and external worlds.

Blue Shop Gallery presents a duo show by Kyungseo Lee and Hannah Lim. Both artists are living and working here in London and we are thrilled to present their work alongside one another as a celebration of the body as a vessel and the vessel as a body. Kyungseo Lee (b.1995) is an artist based in London. She earned her MA at the Royal College of Art in Painting (2023) and BA at Hongik University in Painting and Visual Communication Design (2020). Hannah Lim (b.1998) is a London based artist working between sculpture, installation and drawing. She received her BA in sculpture from the University of Edinburgh and her MFA from The University of Oxford’s Ruskin School of Art.

’All This Wrath’ is an exhibition that serves as a visual dialogue on the prevailing state of our world. Through the eyes of artists grappling with the complexities of our time, this group show delves into the looming claustrophobia imposed by the current state of affairs.

As multiple wars rage on and a cost of living crisis intensifies, artists find solace and expression in the power of paint. In these works, emotions unfold and materialize, capturing the spectrum of human experience in the face of adversity.

Orla Kane (b.1999) is a Scottish artist based in Glasgow. Orla’s practice is a poetic exchange between personal memories and landscapes. The idea of a landscape is disrupted and abstracted into vessels often reflecting bodily forms. Working predominantly with coloured pencil and watercolours she saturates the surface and then washes the pigments away leaving hollow traces. These soft impressions allude to dreamy environments and use anthropomorphic forms to inhabit the narrative in these fluid spaces.

In ‘Shaken Ground’, the paintings consider how landscapes are internalised and adjusted in their recollection. They hint at an inborn pliancy in both the land and the hazy figures cradled by it. When channelled through such mutable conduits, what is real and what is unreal in the landscapes are made equal in their retelling. The paintings acknowledge this by presenting figures as dissoluble in their surroundings, some literally treading water but all afloat on a mire of hearsay.

From 26 - 29 October 2023 we’ll be joining over 500 independent artists, famous names and specialist galleries at Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair, the UK’s largest celebration of contemporary print. Featuring 1000+ limited edition original prints, this is the ideal opportunity to discover new artists and find *that* artwork to compliment that space perfectly. Moreover, there’ll be an accompanying programme of interactive talks and workshops, covering everything from art investment to home interior design.

Alice Neave works predominantly with raw calico & canvas, raw pigment, thread, and an assortment of other mediums. Neave washes the material over & over, builds on it, then hand- stitches pieces together to create a painting in which process and materiality is at the heart of the work. Neave uses these seasoned surfaces along with gesture, and texture to explore personal themes and motifs whilst bringing to the forefront a strong material image that leaves the viewer with a huge amount of ambiguity.

Rosalind Howdle (b.1997) is a British/American artist based in London. Howdle studied Painting at The Royal College of Art (2022) and Camberwell College of Arts, UAL (2019). She has also studied the Rhode Island School of Design (U.S.) and Emily Carr University of Art and Design (Canada). She was awarded the Vanguard Prize in 2019. Howdle attended the RCA as a recipient of the Ali H. Alkazzi Scholarship (2020-22). She was shortlisted for the ‘Now Introducing Prize 2022’ and included in Artlyst’s Ones to Watch 2023.

Greg Stevens (b.1994) is an interdisciplinary artist working in printmaking, painting and ceramics. His work attempts to capture a detritus of memory alongside the observed as it moves anarchically between the abstract and the figurative. His works contain a kinetic sense of forms in movement, pulsating within an unstable choreography. The subject is drawn from a merging of observed imagery, extracted from drawings made en plein air, and a more imagined inner psychological landscape. Printmaking provides a further way to develop surface marks and create some element of chance. Attempting to avoid and subvert sterility, the fluidity of monotype helps to pursue an instinctiveness he feels is necessary for the anxiously intense, often violently colourful pictures he creates.

Katy Papineau (b.1991) is a figurative painter who lives and works in London. She graduated in Philosophy from the University of Bristol in 2014, and completed The Drawing Year at The Royal Drawing School in 2019. Since graduating she has participated in artist residencies in France and Italy, and has taken part in group shows at Blue Shop Gallery, Christie’s London, Frestonian Gallery, and Compton Verney, among others. Papineau is currently part of the faculty at the Royal Drawing School, where her teaching focuses on symbolism, memory and imagination. Named for Blake’s poem of trickery and wrath, A Poison Tree is an exploration of the nature of memory and the minds of others. Papineau uses symbolic imagery to investigate themes of freedom and constraint, discovery and ignorance.

Manon Steyaert is a French-British artist based in London. Steyaert received her graduate degree from Central St. Martins, MAF in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts in 2019. Steyaert’s practice is situated between the two worlds of painting and sculpture, able to create both wall-based works and free-standing abstract sculptures. With a strong background in fashion as well as art, the artist pays homage to both traditional and non-traditional mediums throughout her practice. Focusing mainly on the aesthetic quality of silicone, Steyaert also utilises canvas, scrim, wood and metal, consequently drawing on the visual language of both architecture and painting.

Sammi Lynch was born in 1995 in the North West of England. She is a recent graduate of the Royal Drawing School whose work explores notions of place and memory and uses the natural world as a cypher for human nature and emotion.Her practice begins withdrawing from life with pastels, these drawings then serve as material for working in the studio and are developed and translated through a range of techniques including painting and printmaking. Her work expresses lived experiences of the environment through canvases that emphasise space, texture and light. The effect of these paintings is to distil momentary impressions, observed or remembered, to immerse us in the sensations of a landscape.

Connie Harrison lives and works in London. Through surfaces and their variations compositions emerge slowly, through a process of layering and stripping away oil paint and a wax paste. In texture, mark, opacity and colour parts of the surface unfold, overlay and entwine. Stimulating movement and depths to the imagery as if they are growing. Her engagement with the natural world is a muse and subject. She works with landscapes she’s visited, overlaying different compositions and building up an overall sense of an abstracted landscape. Areas and marks are also carved away, like pathways leading you in or exposing roots that lie beneath, holding the image in place. Although built with numerous layers, the paintings themselves aim towards a kind of weightlessness. Colours seem to hover that are meticulously placed over layers of an opaque wax paste. Natural forms and elements of landscapes, floating between foreground and background. In and out of familiarity.

Hartley set out in printmaking, making large scale woodcuts, her work referenced dreams, familiar landscapes and with fragments of her own text. Her time in the printmaking department at the RCA encouraged her to push scale as far as she could and take her mark making to a more expressive outlet in mono screen printing. The mark became more intuitive, forceful and the voice more urgent.

Alice Hartley had two sell out shows at Blue Shop Cottage in 2021 as well as appearing at London Art Fair in 2022 and we are thrilled to now be representing her as a gallery artist. Alice is a true painter working through a silk screen and directly onto the canvas and her emotive expressive works have brought thousands of collectors down to the Blue Shop Cottage, this is her first solo show at our brand new Blue Shop Gallery in Oval, South London.

Our second exhibition of 2023 brings together two solo shows back-to-back by a pair of young artists from Camberwell College of Arts. Charlie Boothright and Archie Boon are two incredibly exciting painters at the edge of their careers. For our show poster Oliver Wade, their close friend and fellow art student, captures their lives, artistic process and creative output in his numerous black and white film photographs. The paintings in this show are urgent, loud and passionate. Wade's documentary photographs echo both the physicality of Boothright and Boon's work, but also the energy and confidence of the pair as artists. We first met them at Blue Shop Cottage in 2020 whilst they were in their first year of art school and now, three years later, we are proud to present their invigorating and energetic bodies of work on our brand new walls.

Chris Hagan (b.1974) is a contemporary visual artist based in Hove, Sussex. Chris began his contemporary fine art practice in 2017, producing figurative and landscape-based works on canvas, paper and mixed media. His works are held in private collections in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain the United States, Canada and Asia. “I have always been interested in some kind of sensory journey when I look at art, that feeling of being engulfed in a massive expanse of rich colour, the sensitivity or contrived violence of brushstrokes and being up close to the tactile almost living nature of paint is still an overwhelming experience to me. When I am in the midst of making a painting, I experience these same feelings in a physical as well as sensory way - the slow evolution, the making and gathering of textured elements over time, the layering and excavation of colour, the search for the accidental.”

In her images of empty seats in the home or in public spaces, and in her shadow figure paintings, Allen explores absence and presence, memory, and ideas around emptiness. Her large interiors are people-less, but they are imbued with a sense of those who have left, or should be there. Intimate home interiors, and empty chairs and sofas, with books on them, or shadows passing over them, suggest questions, and a sense of longing for a past moment in time. She says of the shadow figures, that they are like a visual echo, and also ‘like dust, the shadows remain’.

Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair – the UK’s largest fair entirely devoted to contemporary prints – returns for its seventh edition! Bigger and better than ever before, WCPF brings together an incredible line-up of 1000 original artworks in a unique hybrid exhibition of emerging artists, famous names and specialist galleries. This year, the Fair is celebrating becoming reachable from Central London’s Tottenham Court Road in just 15 mins, via the newly opened Elizabeth line.

Visitors will have the opportunity to peruse original prints from the most exciting artists working today at accessible price points, as well as take part in a thriving interactive programme of talks, workshops and live demonstrations from leading Curators, Collectors & Creatives.

CURRENTS, an exhibition of new paintings from aunt and niece, Emma Hartley and Alice Hartley. 12th-17th October at the gallery@OXO. Hartley set out in printmaking, making large scale woodcuts, her work referenced dreams, familiar landscapes and with fragments of her own text. Her time in the printmaking department at the RCA encouraged her to push scale as far as she could and take her mark making to a more expressive outlet in mono screen printing. The mark became more intuitive, forceful and the voice more urgent.

Blue Shop Cottage presents Alice Hartley, Adam Hedley and Jess Allen at London Art Fair 2022. Our curation of works selected for the London Art Fair 2022, concerns light and how it dances into and out of our physical and inner emotional landscapes. The memories we hold, the places we live, the rooms we inhabit and the souls that inhabit us. The world around us can pulse and glow or darken and loom. Light is the symbol of hope we seek, search for and hold onto. We are always drawn in - to a flash of red amongst an orchestra of green or a glowing orb of yellow in an ocean of blue.