Morphosis

Fine Art Gallery West Contemporary is pleased to celebrate its launch with a group show of some of their finest leading talent. Following on from the success of their sister gallery, Beautiful Crime - also founded by art dealer and gallerist, Liam West -West Contemporary will now introduce a new platform for a roster of established contemporary fine artists.

Entitled Morphosis, West Contemporary’s inaugural show will incorporate a mixture of sculpture, painting, mixed media, photography and neon and light art.

Liam founded Beautiful Crime as a gallery and one of the first e-commerce platforms in the UK to sell art online in 2006. It initially specialised in street and pop art, keeping prices in affordable price brackets, attracting a wide demographic of art lovers and first-time art buyers. As their clientele evolved and their artists matured, attracting new talent along the way, he decided that a new gallery concept needed to be created to accommodate the growing portfolio. A mutable art platform for emerging and established and emerging painters, sculptors and makers, West Contemporary’s inaugural show will include new works by Chris Moon, Toma?s Baleztena, Beth Cullen- Kerridge, Jim Threapleton, Robi Waters, Ryan McElhinney, Mark Beattie, Zoe Grace, Carne Grifiths and Matt Mackman.

Each artist is creating new work for the show, interpreting a state of dreamy meditation as a basis of exploring ideas and composition. Chris Moon, whose tantalising and figurative brushstrokes are often compared to those of 20th century expressionist, surrealist, and at times cubist painter Francis Bacon will create a series of new paintings. Capturing the emotional state of an “elusive daydream” is Moon’s calling card, whether he is a painting a dead animal, his partner of the moment or a thrift-store postcard: “You can dream reality and vice versa, and that comes back to the technique leading the journey, becoming the daydream.”
Fellow expressionist Tomas Balaztena, who has exhibited at The National Portrait Gallery in London has painted a series of compositions, including Degas-laced
work of his fiance? Amy Molyneux, who is depicted musing absent-mindedly while removing her make-up. Balaztena will also present a painting of an empty street in Hampstead, eerie and presumably set in the early hours of the morning, at Witching Hour perhaps, with the influence of Manet, ever-present in his compositions. Meanwhile filmmaker-turned artist, Jim Threapleton will also present his own series of stormy melancholia, including a number of disquietingly ambitious vintage photographic portraits of subjects obfuscated by paint.

The unconscious metaphysical world is so vital to the process of Robi Walters' making, each final work is the end result of a journey of introspection. Walters trained as a graphic designer before he started producing stunning collages, mixed media pieces bursting with colour, arranged in lotus-like forms. After a broken childhood spent in and out of social care, Walters sought out a path where holistic healing could be integrated into his creative process and discovered meditation. Waters works with discarded, recycled materials, scissor- cut by hand into the thousand-petal lotus shape. The organic and fluid nature of the works o er a sense of infinity and calm, rooted in his notion of a Kaleidacycle in which ‘every petal counts.’ Meanwhile the subtext in Robi’s work, in his use of waste as a resource, scrutinises the topic of consumption - and human existence itself
- in the 21st century.

As a continuation with a similar thread,
recycling materials and creating pieces that look at urban decay in the name of art, Ryan McElhinney has created new works for the show. Like Walters, finding beauty where others see discarded objects, McElhinney makes artistic yet practical pieces of recycled toys which are bonded together and then coated in a high gloss polyurethane lacq