After a successful run of nomadic exhibitions held in clothing shops and galleries across the city, London gallerist Freddie Foulkes celebrated the opening of his permanent space in the arches of the historic Shepherd’s Bush Market last week. Bringing together four artists – Alexander Carey-Morgan, Charlie Gosling, Emily Wilcock and Hunter Amos – the inaugural exhibition saw eager crowds of art-goers spill out the arches and into the surrounding market, a testament to Foulkes’ active commitment to the local scene.
Featuring a rich selection of portrait, figurative and landscape paintings, sculptures and, soon to come, live performances, the show – titled A Brutal Kind of Bloom – makes a strong case for sensation-based art that favours ritual and affect over contemporary minimalism and conceptualist ideas. As the exhibition text puts it: “In a world of quantification and statistics in which we are told the things that matter can be measured and described, there are new artists who suggest otherwise.” From Australian-born Hunter Amos’ dreamstate oil paintings of perceptual otherworlds to Alexander Carey-Morgan’s earthy interpretations poppy and papaver fields – made by staining and canvas with watercolour and coffee – the centrality of human mark-making feels particularly resistant to algorithmic instrumentality, grounding viewers in abstract and ancient forms, which recall pre-modern modes of visual language.
Elsewhere, British artist Charlie Gosling’s figurative paintings of friends and acquaintances glimpsed the inner world of his subjects through expressive and painterly textures. British-Australian artist Emily Wilcock’s brightly coloured and restless portraits featured fast brush strokes and fearless incisions that Foulkes describes as pure “mind-to-hand art-making”. What united the works on show was a deep engagement with the affective dimensions of experience, stretching beyond representational forms into the sublime. To quote Philip Guston in A Life Lived: “What the hell would I want to do with information when sensation is on offer.”
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