View work

Private View: Thursday November 15th, 2007, 6:00 to 8:30 PM   
Afterwards join us at the Centre for the Aesthetic and Intellectual Revolution,
The Red Lion Pub, 14 Kingly Street W1

The exhibition will remain open until December 15th, 2007
Gallery hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 10 AM to 6 PM

Blow de la Barra is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by Caroline Achaintre.

Six Strings gathers a selection of new pieces that continue Achaintre’s explorations on formal representations existing between the abstract and the figurative.

Black and white geometric shapes dominate the artist’s new hand tufted woollen rugs, from the rhomboidal shapes of Timber Liner, to the guitar like shape of Six Strings these pieces recall the early avant-garde investigations on abstraction in painting and sculpture. Meanwhile, disfigured masks or faces with a non-specific appearance emerge from the heavy woollen rugs Nose and Coner, where lumps of red and deep blue threads fiercely erupt from the black and white colour combination creating an odd tension between medium and form and offering a bleak reminder of the medium’s anthropomorphic qualities.

Accompanying the rugs, a series of black and white linocuts depicting a hybrid of masks and faces are pined on the walls. The heavy thick lines of the prints reduce all forms to pure expression, cancelling volume and delivering a starkly plain image. Achaintre’s experimentations with this medium keep a very close resemblance to the woodcuts made by the German expressionist collective Die Brucke, when representations of the so-called ‘primitive art’ opened the path to abstraction.

Displayed in a vitrine, a collection of paper objects, made of drawings of ink, pen and pencil are re-arranged on a variety of shapes, sizes and volumes. As if in a cabinet of curiosities, the categorical boundaries and nature of these new objects are yet to be defined. It is probably this lack of definition together with the ambiguous and at times amorphous nature of Achaintre’s work and the subjects she depicts, that associates it to Freud’s notion of the uncanny, an instance where something can be familiar, yet foreign at the same time, resulting in an uncomfortably strange feeling. This duality becomes obvious in her watercolour and digital print drawings, which are both fragile and precious while depicting sinister, disfigured face-like forms.  Repulsion and attraction are in constant tension in her practice, a tension that is easily translated to the variety of mediums and the different modes of production she experiments with.  

Achaintre’s work has the ability to awake in the viewer a sense of uneasiness by unfolding a purely fantastic world of her own creation that holds many references to the real one. The subjects she depicts relate both to images loaded with meanings and to formal plastic and medium based considerations. Her constant appropriation of forms to which she consciously adds distortion descends to an obscure aesthetic in which the only possible representation of the object is through its dissolution and disfiguration.

Caroline Achaintre is an artist based in London. She graduated from Goldsmiths MA Fine Art in 2003. She has previously exhibited at the Showroom, London, and Mirko Mayer Galerie, Cologne.  Her work has been included in a number of group exhibitions including Strange Weight, Martos Gallery, New York, Metropolis Rise, New Art From London, CQL Design Centre, Shanghai, Acid Rain, Galerie Michel Rein, Paris, Contropop Vamiali's, Athens and The Unhomely, Kettles Yard, Cambridge.