Greg Stevens in his East London studio shot by Ocki, 2022
Blue Shop Gallery presents
Greg Stevens
'Among The Leaves’
3rd - 20th August 2023
PV Drinks Wednesday 2nd August 6-9pm
72 Brixton Road, Oval SW9 6BH
Gallery opening hours:
Wednesday - Sunday | 11am - 6pm
GREG STEVENS
Greg Stevens (b.1994) is an interdisciplinary artist working in printmaking, painting and ceramics. Currently living and working in London, he graduated from the Royal Drawing School in 2022 and Kingston School of Art 2019. 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 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. Greg has recently been awarded residencies in Scotland and India. He has exhibited work at Christie’s, Buckingham Palace and Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair.
AMONG THE LEAVES
‘Among The Leaves’ brings together works in varied mediums, a collection of monotypes, painting and ceramics. Foraging through the undergrowth, eyes stare out of abstracted landscapes and hands reach out, to gift foraged flowers or sink into fluid depths. Disrupted creatures spread their wings for their nuptial flight while others emerge after metamorphosis. Forms within the work can be collected from the forest floor and organic matter alongside cultural detritus, observed, elevated and re-examined for the natural, surreal and mystical power they contain. Scale varies from the vast to the minute through these indeterminate psychological landscapes, while frenetic marks capture the sense of anxious nature in flux beneath the radiant colour. In some instances the marks are almost psychedelic camouflage masking archetypal imagery amongst the interconnecting forms of paint. Playfully, the work questions presumptions of what we are sensorially experiencing and the reality that surrounds us.
The different processes used help to capture a sense of time, transformation and seasonal change. While the large canvas works are created through layering, worked and re-worked, they go through many applications. Conversely, the hand-printed monotypes are mostly created within the single day lifespan of the mayfly, almost calligraphic they capture a liberated momentary thought. The monotypes are simultaneously playful yet unforgiving, a forced finality and time window of creation reliant on conviction and restraint. Whether through divisions in paper, composition, imagery or format the works harken back to printmaking's reflective impressions.
The eyes that stare through ‘Sulfur’ look simultaneously afraid and menacing, but always confrontational. While porcelain ears listen intently to the deluge of activity… are the biomorphic shapes coming into being? A celebration of life or an apocalyptic swarm?
Email hello@blueshopcottage.com to register for the catalogue
‘Sulfur’, Greg Stevens, Monotype on Fabriano Paper, Framed in Maple, 2023