“Connections is what interests me. How we find ways to relate whatever background, circumstances and experiences we have been through. Courage to step out of comfort zones of fashions. Finding those passages through, however hard, but trying to keep travelling to more understanding with an open heart. So as to encourage more informed and compassionate ideas in our crazy world.”
Caroline has been a working artist all her life since she first exhibited age eleven in Harrods, London, through a competition judged by Augustus John.
After a false start in fashion in the 60s, a period where she sold her handmade silk batik scarves at Libertys and exported to Hong Kong, she rekindled her true identity of multimedia artist.
Caroline has exhibited widely all her life through solo and group shows internationally, but also collaborating extensively with other artists and art forms especially with professional dancers, and as a textile designer for performing arts. Throughout her life she has also been involved in community arts and ‘Artist in Schools’ projects, believing passionately how important arts is, in all its forms, for society and what insanity it is now to cut it in schools.
She has spent a great deal of time in Asia, especially China where she had a large solo exhibition in XYZ Gallery Beijing. She loves to interact fully with all cultures and loves all their enormous variety in London. This reflects across her wide range of work.
“Altered”, a group show that aims to push the idea of collaboration and ownership so present in our post digital culture.
This project arises as a reflective thinking on Rauschenberg & De Kooning “collaboration drawing” hanging at the MOMA to challenge our notion of ownership. It mirrors today's visual world that is copied, reposted through social media and raises questions about copyright, value and ownership.
The experience involved ten London based artists, coupled in pairs, and finishing each other’s works whilst reflecting on the experience. The results are astounding.
A solo exhibition including painting, drawing, photography, sculpture and performance art, all focusing on the artist’s personal identity, migration, sexuality and human relationships.
This is KV’s second solo show. The London based artist draws from personal experiences growing up in Saigon, Toronto and London to explore the integration and conflict of Eastern and Western cultures and values. There is a sense of urgency and vulnerability in the artist’s explorative use of material and texture: works on packaging cardboard are a tribute his parents’ factory work in Canada; works on carbon fibre
polymer are reflective of his structural engineering background; works on mulberry paper and ink are inspired by the mediums used by the Asian calligraphy masters.
Nico Chacon is a multi disciplinary artist born in Venezuela who started his artistic career as a theatre actor, later moved on to Madrid where he developed his career further as a screenwriter and director in the short film ‘Letizia’.
More recently living in Amsterdam and currently based in Luxembourg, his unstoppable creativity and exploration of other artistic media led him to sculpture. Three years ago Nico gives birth to his extensive project “Shining Zoo by Nico Chacon” which is the result of his creative mind and autodidact spirit.
After 3 years, he has created an entire universe of shining sculptures of animals with more than 50 handmade art pieces completely sold out internationally, and with commissions in waiting list. Nico is in continuous development with new materials and ideas and his shining universe includes a range of products including handmade ‘shining’ t-shirts which will also be available for sale. Currently, Nico is expanding this project with new forms and designs without abandoning his own style which has proven extremely successful.
The exhibition showcases three brand new pieces from the Shining Zoo universe which will surely be a Christmas hit.
Chacon's works are accompanied by other stunning pieces by DALOPO, SR-X, Caroline Hands, Marina Viatkina, Nara Walker, and Charles Harrop-Griffiths
Jacinto Caetano is a London based graphic designer and visual artist with a passion for photography and architecture and a solid and successful career in concept development and art direction in the world of advertising. His work became instantly recognisable since the re-branding of the London Cycle Hire scheme ‘Santander Cycles’ otherwise known as ‘Boris Bikes’, where he created innovative designs of London’s most representative landmarks now featured on all 13,600 bikes. This project was about identifying graphically these buildings and make them look as striking as possible. Caetano developed his own technique to make 2D drawings look like 3D objects coming to life. This was the foundation for ‘Twisted Lines’.
Caetano’s true love for architecture is reflected in this exhibition through unique depictions of London and other international iconic landmarks. Twisted Lines is,
so, the result of his restless life and his passion for the cities and their buildings all around the World.
Caetano's inclination towards design and visual arts started when he was a kid, obsessed with changing everything around him; he says "from moving round furniture in my bedroom to renewing the covers of textbooks. Basically, if it existed, I had to change it".
In 2002, Caetano started studying graphic design in his natal city of Seville. By 2004 he had become Art Director in a new communication agency in Seville. After taking some time to travel around the world and living in Saudi Arabia, Caetano returns to graphic design in 2009 and enrols in a top design school in Barcelona. In 2013, he moves to London and joins the prestigious advertising agency WCRS, and his professional prestige climbs to new levels, especially after his designs and concept feature the Santander bikes campaign. Highly recognisable all over London, the red 'Boris bikes' show very sleek silhouettes of the main landmarks in the capital. Other big successes so far have been the #NOFILTER and #LoveHappensHere campaigns for London Pride; wonderful messages with a freedom-filled ethos delivered by well-known advocates like Ian McKellen and Graham Norton and shared thousands of times in social media.
“I concentrate on interpersonal relations, self-improvement, introspection and understanding of others, transferring the conclusions of these observations to my paintings. I focused primarily on the constant striving for perfection, both physical and spiritual, the beauty of the body, eroticism and the capturing the variety of emotions hidden in every human being without unnecessary moralizing or pomposity.
My art is about everything that describes us. Emotions, ambitions, strengths and weaknesses, passions, desires, memories and dreams… hoping that will bring more good to our existence, using the universal language of art.”
.” - Kris Cieslak
A collection of fifteen portrait paintings from the last two years of the artist travelling through Asia; Exploring the surreal aesthetics between native indigenous cultures and traditional high society of East and SouthEast Asia.
Luke Gray (UK) is a perpetual traveller and multimedia fine artist specializing in surrealist paintings and large scale augmented reality murals. Born colour blind he was forced to use an almost exclusively monochrome palette, working with patterns and textures rather than colour.
Growing up mixed race in a multicultural family he grew up with an interest in different cultures and began to explore ethnography and world travel. After hitchhiking across 50+ countries on his travels his work became influenced by a wide range of multicultural art styles and traditional mediums - combining and integrating techniques and patterns from different cultures into his work. Informed by this ethnographic research of traditional cultures and indigenous tribes, he spends time to live with them and learn from them taking meticulous notes on their textiles, tattoo markings, rituals, altered states, and sacred symbols and tries to preserve them in his art.
Long before social media, telephones or telegram existed, the only way to preserve our history and heritage was through the storytellers who wandered between villages. It was also a form of education – the stories often had a moral message.
Storytelling is a collection of narratives, some real but mostly fictional, that we can often identify with.
Life events and meetings with people all generate an experience that affects our identity. This new body of work is exploring our multidimensional facets – how our life experiences together make us who we are.
The layer of oil paint on the semi-transparent organza and tulle is only skin-deep and does not fully cover what is behind. This could be seen as a metaphor for how our past and our heritage play a role in the present – it is not always visible but it is there.
Silhouettes with colour patches blended together on cotton canvas, organza and tulle have symbols and narratives on them. The large painting that greets the visitor as you walk in reflects a possible heritage of the artist in the city of Milyang in South East Korea. Its’ imprint of the traditional Korean sliding walls painted ajar, welcomes the viewer to her personal journey.
This is Pernilla’s second one-person show in London and follows a successful one-person show in Sweden. She has work in collections in England, Sweden, USA and Malaysia.
Cabral presents a series of works produced with his distinctive multi-layered technique which creates unique textures and dimension to his abstract artworks.
With a long trajectory which includes several international art festival appearances and dividing his time between London and Cape Town, Cabral takes inspiration from the colourful palette of the inspiring African landscape along with the vibrant, fast-paced cultural scene of one of Europe’s great capitals.
This South African fascination with art began at a young age with his maternal grandmother, a well-known artist of Portuguese origin. Her influence left a strong impression on Ricardo. It aroused a distinctive inquisitiveness that has characterised his work since the early days of art workshops up to his more mature studied work of today.
For Cabral, a work of art and the space it occupies are both equally important and form one entity that cannot be separately understood. Both must be given equal care and attention.
Innovation is also clearly visible in Ricardo’s work and can be seen through the use of techniques and materials that intensify the visual experience and add a unique touch to the artist’s style.
‘Artytecture’ is a playful intersection of the worlds of architecture and visual arts. A dive into the minds and hearts of architects and artists from two different points of view.
On one hand, the exhibition is an encounter of architects who are also visual artists, with the purpose of finding out in which ways practice informs artistic output and vice versa. In the absence of the physical constraints brought by conceiving and building inhabitable structures, there is free reign for imagination where mainly bounds of gravity and budget remain.
On the other hand, we explore the work of visual artists inspired by architecture and man made spatial constructions. This is an interesting opportunity to look into other views of physicality via impossible perspectives, and different approaches to representation and function. But also a way to explore extrinsic attributes, learning how architectural landmarks are perceived and valued with memory and emotion, through the lens of an artist.
Participating artists:
Aldo Cupido - Daniel O’Sullivan - Ernesto Romano - Helen Shulkin - Jacinto Caetano - Lyndsey Pickett - Maria Linares Freire - Otilia Goodhind - Ting-an Lin
Ireneo Frizzarin is a painter and multidisciplinary artist whose work has been featured in solo exhibitions in London, New York, Spain and his native Italy, and can be found in private collections worldwide.
Frizzarin has lived and worked in London since 2002. After graduating from the University of the Arts, London, in 2008, he began undertaking private commissions. His recent works include a collaboration with Donna Karan NY and Gordon Ramsey. His works currently grace the walls of one of Mr Ramsey’s latest culinary ventures.
Memories of facts, people and events have a strong influence on his paintings, which attempt to capture moments in his life. Looking critically at the intrinsic value of life, actions, words and objects is an essential feature of his extensive body of work.
A selection of artworks from exciting UK based and international artists. to mark the launch of RB12 and the start of Chrom-Art's Art programme in the venue.
Participating artists: Arturo Garcia de las Heras, Bella Grigoryants (Berlin), Buse Tanil, DALOPO (Seville), Kris Cieslak, and KV Duong. Artist painting live at the opening: Luke Gray and William Hughes.