See/ Deep in the Green Lilac Park/ 10 October to 2 November 2012
London
General Information
Twenty works, ordered formally over the three floors of the gallery, will proceed from deep greens through rich reds and purples to a top floor of bright yellows and lilacs. The title of the show, a line from a Leonard Cohen song, suggests a ritualised and romantic set of encounters, as do the titles of the works themselves, which are taken from the T. S. Eliot poem, Ash Wednesday.
Prices range from £5,000 – £15,000.
Nicholas Rena creates monumental, imposing vessels, with thick walls and definite flat rims. They are meticulously finished and painted and are press moulded in clay, which the artist finds both ‘precise and sensual’.
Rena’s work is concerned with uniting figure with landscape, emptiness with fulfilment. The vessels, so evidently empty, have the capacity to be filled and their variety of soft, sumptuous and celebratory colours reflect how an encounter (both in nature and with another person) can move between absence and fulfilment.
Rena’s work includes the acclaimed Jerwood prize installation (2008) and is represented in the permanent public collections of the Louvre, Paris, the V & A Museum, the British Council, No.10 Downing Street, London, and the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, USA, amongst others.
