Lot 5 Collective: Face Value

Lot 5 Collective’s fourth exhibition, Face Value, which will be staged at the Royal Opera Arcade Gallery, London, running from 8 – 17 November 2018.

The six artists that make up the collective, Lizet Dingemans, SJ Fuerst, Lucas Garcia, Luca Indraccolo, Helen Masacz and Harriet Spratt, seek to ‘reconcile contradictions by applying traditional techniques to modern themes, combining classical beauty with contemporary culture, and uniting expression with representation’ – using the old to create the new.

Face Value focuses on contemporary portraiture, and also will feature a number of international guest artists. These include Felicia Forte, whose painting Time Traveler, (Matthew Napping) was awarded Second Prize at the 2018 BP Portrait Awards, as well as Arvid Antonsen, Simon Davis, Scott Eaton, Sainer Etam, Phillip Harris, Milo Hartnoll, Emma Hopkins, Stella Ishack, Hans van der Leeuw, Emanuela de Musis, Shana Levenson, Anastasia Pollard, Daniel Sequeira, Travis Seymour, Nicolas Uribe, Sofia Welch and Sharn Whitehead.

The works in Face Value showcase a variety of styles and subject matter but are linked by the artists’ commitment to representational painting, portraiture and contemporary art’s capacity to articulate the complexities of the human condition.

SJ Fuerst’s work is a mix of the styles of Pop art and classical painting, which he brings together to create playful tableaus that reinterpret elements of contemporary culture, each a slightly twisted version of the familiar. Fuerst is inspired by costume, toys, and fashion photography, and often incorporates the surreal atmosphere and compositional strategies of the latter to invoke a sense of fantasy.

With his latest works, Luca Indraccolo takes inspiration from the fires that devastated the Vesuvius National Park in Italy in the summer of 2017. This disaster is used as a starting point to make a comment on the global destruction of natural environment for financial gain of a few unscrupulous people. The impressive columns of smoke that rose kilometers into the air are a strong visual device that links all the paintings in this series.

Helen Masacz’s latest paintings draw on her passion for music; she has been interpreting album titles by well-known musicians. For her, Face Value represents the paradox between the familiar and unfamiliar that underlies contemporary culture. Her painting Technical Ecstasy (2018) is a portrait that reflects the current climate of paranoia and violence in the world and expresses how technology has created the means to destroy us.

Masacz will also be showing her work Boris Johnson – Cover Up (2018), a life-size portrait of Boris Johnson that was originally shown at the BP Portrait Awards at the National Portrait Gallery, at the time that Johnson was the Mayor of London.

Inspired by current political events, when the painting was returned to her, Masacz invited her students to ‘deface’ the painting, using oil paint applied with palette knives in expressive marks. Masacz then re-named the work ‘Cover Up’. For this exhibition, members of the public will be invited to add to the work in a similar fashion. At the end of the show, the painting will be sold by auction, with all proceeds going to the homeless charity, Shelter.