Hundred Years Gallery is pleased to present two solo exhibitions awarded to the artists with the highest number of visitors’ votes from this year’s Open Call : Change, for better or worse, for richer or poorer.
Julie Ann Steward : Time ^ Art^ Place (ground floor)
‘Timespan St Pancras (from gasometer to champagne bar) 2014-2019, (charcoal on paper) is an effort to convey in a single work the sense of dramatic transformation that began over twenty years ago. Timespan Liverpool Street 2015-2019 (charcoal, pastel and collage on paper) is a similar piece. These and two other works are notional milestones marking the passage of time and the ephemeral figures that populate them are but eddies ‘in the stream of immemorial life’*. The viewpoint from which each of the works was made is from ground level looking up, along and around, which gives a feeling of being dwarfed, almost trodden on. It could be the view of a homeless person and the Spitalfields work is indeed the site of a Don McCullin photograph of the homeless in the 1970s.’
Julie Ann first majored in History and French and then worked as a French teacher. From
1979 to 1989, she lived and worked in Japan as an English teacher and it was there that
she began drawing in charcoal and painting in oils. Back in England, she completed an
MA in Women’s Studies with a thesis on Japonisme and Sexuality, investigating the
influence of Japanese art on the representation of women and sexuality in French art from
the 1850s to the turn of the century. After that, she taught ESOL half time and studied
Fine Art part time, first for a BA at London Metropolitan University, followed by an MA at
Middlesex University. The main focus of the MA was walking as art, medium and form.
Since then, she has participated in numerous group exhibitions, often with a group called
the Tunnel and sometimes in collaboration with other artists. Her practice has embraced
walking, installation with found or made objects, photography, a sound piece and even
baking. Meanwhile, she has done numerous courses, mainly with the Royal Drawing
School, to develop her prime interest which is drawing and painting from observation and
memory.
John Gathercole : Figuratively Fiction (basement gallery)
John Gathercole has been working professionally for many years, selling and showing internationally, including both Tate Modern and Britain. Painting is his first love but initially found success as the founder of the Kreative Union of Neo-aesthetic Terrorists, (the K.U.N.T ists, a play on the German word for art). An anti aesthetic anti art punk collective that lampooned the art world.
John Gathercole’s solo work still has an irreverent attitude but now tackles more personal and deeper issues of aesthetics, cognition and media by exploring the void between beauty and reality with a blend of humour and horror, which feeds the contemporary human and social neurosis.
Challenging the perpetual human preoccupation with mortality, truth and happiness through painterly deconstructed and associated images, he develops identifiable but challenging abstract surreal narratives, asking the viewer to re-evaluate what they believe and what they just except to be aesthetically and socially true or false in this modern age of surface and fake values.
The paintings appropriate a range of influences from, philosophy, psychology, art history and popular culture including, Existentialism, Gestalt theory, Carl Rogers, Lars Elling, Kate Gottgens, Jenny Saville and Epictetus.
Technically his practice has become increasingly more about paint and the act of painting, its processes and applications. Although still figurative, they have ceased to dominate the artistic plain and evolved into figures within a setting or happening or sometimes just lost in the paint itself. Less of a figure or portrait painting and more of a painting about paint with a figure or portrait as conveyor in a gestural landscape.