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Henley Festival |
Sculpture Lawn|
Festival Gallery|
Riverside Gallery|
Reach Gallery visual arts 2008: Festival GalleryCourcoux & Courcoux Guy Taplin  Georgina Potter  Rebecca Lardner  Sandra Bell This will be Courcoux & Courcoux Contemporary Art's third year exhibiting at Henley Festival. Regarded as one of the finest provincial galleries in Britain, we bring back some artists whose work we have exhibited before, plus some new faces. The gallery was established by gallery director Ian Courcoux in 1985 and has regularly exhibited the work of leading British and foreign artists as well as up-and-comers. Dame Elisabeth Frink showed with us until her death in 1993 and Sophie Ryder, who has a current major retrospective at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, has been represented since 1987. Other leading painters such as Ken Howard and Mary Fedden have also exhibited, as well as sculptors of the stature of Geoffrey Dashwood and Guy Taplin. Among those being exhibited this year are
Towards the end of 2007, Georgina, 30, won the highly prestigious Diana Brooks Prize which is open to artists living in Greater London and who are under the age of 35. On the sculpture lawn we shall have Geoffrey Dashwood's wonderful bronze Grebe - the latest of his monumental sculptures. Last year was enormously successful in terms of both appreciation of the work on view and sales. We look forward to another great week at this wonderful Festival. Rebecca Hossack GalleryIain Nutting
also on the Sculpture Lawn Iain trained at St. Martin’s School of Art, London and was assistant to Anthony Gormley, Turner Prize winner. Although he has a fine understanding of all the traditional sculptural techniques, his preference has always been for constructed metal sculpture, which uses the industrial welding process. Iain draws inspiration from the natural world preferring when possible to work from life. He cuts and welds recycled metal into sculptures, which capture the very essence of his subject. Steven Nederveen
Steven Nederveen combines traditional Japanese painting ideas with contemporary materials and methods. The ancient Zen - like imagery of panoramic mountain vistas, knarled trees and swimming fish are adapted to today’s artistic techniques. His explorations are on the aesthetic of beautiful melancholy, a sensibility best described by the Japanese term Wabi Sabi. Wabi Sabi is a vague expression used to describe the beauty in imperfection and profundity in nature of accepting the natural cycle of growth, decay and death. However the techniques he uses are quite opposite - the virtuosity of computer editing is used to erase, blur and mimic authenticity. Assembling multiple photographic images and coating in resin. The painting then occurs on top of the edited photograph, which in turn pulls back the element of authenticity in order to maintain tension between the two ideas. Lynn ParottiInaqua, the southernmost of the Bahama archipelago gets its name from Heneagua, derived from a Spanish word meaning 'water is to be found there’. The island is home to the world’s largest population of West Indian flamingos, who share a symbiotic relationship with the Morton Salt Company and is now the focus of Lynn Parotti’s latest work. The flamingos which make their last retreat here in the remote and harsh environment of mangroves feed on the brine shrimp that live in the salt lagoons, and in return keep the lagoons virtually algae-free. The Morton Salt Company is the main employer on the island and is one of the largest solar salt operations in the world: But for how much longer? For a number of years climate change and global warming has been the cause of growing unease to the industry on Inagua. It is now at crisis level; there is simply too much rain. Last year this above normal rainfall caused the salt cakes to melt, brine was diluted and there was a 240,000 ton deficit in the salt harvest. The plight of Inagua has caught Lynn Parotti’s attention; the man - made salt hills, ghostly, symbolic rather than representational, white skeletal calcified trees, a flash of pink. The tension is in the heavy brush strokes, the sheen of oil paint and viscosity of water, evoking but never dictating the reality: the contrast between the innate beauty and ecological fragility now recognisable to us all. Parotti is giving us something beyond the scene; the emotion of being in a special time and place, the desperation of mangroves roots upended in their search for oxygen, the movement and rhythms of waves; waves of flamingos, waves of salt, reflections of desaturated colour, washed out by salt, and sunlight. The connection and interdependences of natural and manmade forces is expressed in these triptychs, with rich sumptuous colour and densely worked surfaces standing beside less vibrant palettes where the waves and sun and the effect of light seems to have washed out the colour or darkened and quietened it into the stillness of mangrove roots. After a week’s expedition to Inagua last January, Parotti said “There is a meeting and clash of the living and the dead in the bleached remains of trees and the superlife of scattering frenetic flamingos and the more gentle ecosystem nursery of the breathing mangroves and other desperate flora.” Lynn Parotti’s work has been exhibited regularly in the US, Italy, the UK and Bahamas, reviewed in The Miami Herald, The Evening Standard, Sky Television, Corriere Della Sera and The Nassau Guardian. In 1992 she attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Summer Residency in Maine. She has lived in London for the past fourteen years and her awards include London Arts Board grants and a Skowhegan Fellowship. Recent group exhibitions include “Safety Zones”, at the Diaspora Vibe Gallery, Miami’s Design District (concurrent with Art Basel Miami Beach from 6-9th Dec) preceded by the solo show “When the Bough Breaks” at the Chelsea Arts Club, last June. She has just returned from a joint exhibition “Limit” at Popop Centre for the Visual Arts in Nassau, Bahamas, Last April 
Lorraine Gill and Richard MorrisLorraine Gill won her first Scholarship in Australia at the age of fifteen to attend Art School in Sydney for 3 years. She later won a Scholarship in London to Florence, after a further 3 years study. Her first one-woman Exhibition at the age of 33, was critically acclaimed by the renowned Art Critic John Berger and others. She then followed by one-woman shows throughout her career. Lorraine spent over 2 years living in the desert of Australia largely with Aboriginal people who kindly received her as a guest Artist. She has been featured with Henry Moore in a BBC programme on Cezanne; plus a film on her life and work. Lorraine also lectures internationally on perception and drawing techniques. She has recently been given an award for her speech and presentation in Singapore; aided by technology; this technology devised by her colleague Richard Morris. This Exhibition is based on the desert experiences of Australia. It is a combination of Art and Technology; where the visual image is married to the computer in a faithful reproduction of the originals. Richard has been working with computers for over twenty years, often undertaking unique commissions from some of the worlds top international companies, always keen to research the unknown, this along with his artistic qualifications and a true passion for photography, he has often felt that the majority of artistic facsimiles seemed lacklustre and flat. Along with Lorraine Gill he has investigated the nature of reproduction, a challenge of epic proportions which marries the the organic forms of oil on canvas and water-colours on paper with the unbelievably large data files and binary world of technology. Massive advances in capacities during the past few years have made this possible to achieve within a reasonable timescale and at a realistic price. The results are simply stunning, making the beholder not only absorb casually from a distance but to totally immerse themselves with close up scrutiny and by the form of touch, comments are varied but usually 'wow!' 
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