Art Exhibition

Leyden Gallery presents the second of their Platform for Emerging Arts shows. Once again our curated exhibition features a select group of emerging and graduate artists; their work has been chosen by way of its engagement with our current theme, Ancient/Modern and highlights the work of an outstanding group of artists and their remarkable art.

Miranda Benzies for Ancient/modern deals with the response to her immediate environment, a trope, which is central to her practice. She is fascinated by how lived environments affect our identities and the London Faces series of paintings combine old and new architecture in the city to create ‘cityscape portraits’, or anthropomorphic landscapes.

After graduating from UCA Canterbury in 2013 Harry Tompkins was selected to display his art work at the Platform Graduate Showcase Exhibition, at the Turner Contemporary in Margate. For Ancient/Modern he presents work using a combination of traditional oil painting and photographic techniques, combining a unique and innovative process in a bold and contemporary way. This series creates a fictional narrative, recognisable to the beholder as we identify the figures, the landscapes and the events unfolding; yet they cannot be understood or identified with any particular time or place.
Louise Evans graduated from Wimbledon College of Art in 2012. Her work has been exhibited in London and in the Netherlands since 2011. Her work has received recognition in being awarded Runner-up prize for Debut Contemporary ‘Artist of Tomorrow’ and the Runner-up Hans Brinker Painting Prize in Amsterdam. Louise Evans is an abstract painter, making paintings about paint. Depicting their own traditional painterly language, the paintings deal with the surface of the canvas. Paint projecting beyond the frame allows for them to become entities in themselves, looking outward rather than looking inward.
Enzo Marra, shortlisted for the ‘100 painters of Tomorrow’ Enzo Marra’s work has also been featured in The Threadneedle Prize for three years and twice selected for the prestigious John Moore’s Painting prize. His creative practise is concerned with the exploration and pictorial analysis of the art world via oil, ink and graphite applications over canvas and paper supports. His work explores the settings of the studio, the gallery, the auction house and the activities of observers to this world.