Contextual research

Antoni Tapies
Antoni Tapies was a distinquished Catalan artist. is work is an example of an artist who uses alot of texture in his work. Tàpies mixed pigment and varnish with unconventional materials, including marble dust and sand, to create dense, wall-like surfaces that are both blank and teasingly
 mysterious.




Tàpies's achievement was to create highly intuitive, enigmatic images that have the potential to change our perception of reality, but defy reduction into a few lines of analysis

 

 Mark Boyle
Mark Boyle was an influential artist born in Glasgow and known for his work in the cultural UK Underground of the 1960s around the Traverse Theatre,

 These pictures - highly accurate painted casts that operate somewhere between painting and sculpture - involve the meticulous re-creation of randomly chosen areas of the Earth's surface using resin and fibreglass (as well as real materials from the site) and have been exhibited internationally.



 

Heather Knight

Heather Knight’s porcelain creations reflect both her love of modern design and her admiration for the natural world. She is passionately committed to the hand made aspect of her work, and delivers pieces that display impeccable craftsmanship and an eye for detail. Her distinctive pieces frequently echo sea creatures, coral, and shells. The smooth unglazed porcelain exterior of her work marks a sharp visual and textural contrast between the glossy, frequently candy-colored interiors

 

Aberto Burri
It is in this exhibition: a fiercely lyrical vision made out of rags of rough sacking stitched to each other as well as the canvas. Among these ochre tatters and patches are occasional holes that reveal a blackness below, like the darkness beneath the riffled surface of a wheat field. And blazing above this horizontal landscape, it seems, is a red harvest sky. Such perfect metaphors all condensed in one: the patchwork of fields, the crop sewn directly into the ground, the conjuring of grain out of grain sacks.
Quite why the eye should read the painting – if it can be called a painting – this way is anyone's guess. For there are other viewers who see it as the evocation of a reclining nude, or the close-up of a bleeding body; and still others who regard it as strictly abstract. But Sacking and Red, as it is called, has an intense presence that has something to do with the red paint, and something to do with the sacking, but above all comes from the curious combination. The red radiates heat across the gallery while the sacking draws you close: it's an appeal to sight, scent and touch.