Winter Garden | James Freeman Gallery, London

The Baron Gilvan | Vasilis Avramidis | Nigel Grimmer | Jane Hoodless | Jon Doran | Hyunjeong Lim | Marta Corada | Jon Braley | Simon Burton

We are pleased to present “The Winter Garden”, a group show designed to bring the year to a close by combining artists we have worked with over the past year together with artists showing with the gallery for the first time. The result is something dynamic, a Janus-like exhibition that looks to both the past and the future as the New Year rises on the horizon.

This year, there is a distinctly animistic undercurrent to the work. The landscapes of Vasilis Avramidis come to life and take the shape of old forest deities trying to make sense of abandoned architecture, next to the jewel-like miniature greenhouses of Jane Hoodless that seem to have sprung up from clumps of seaweed.

Simon Burton’s mistily other-wordly animals wander alone in the dark forest night, while recent graduate Jon Doran describes daytime adventures into the woods, complete with the dapple and spray of sunlight through the leaves. Nigel Grimmer’s photographs place the artist in a grove disguised as a 70s kitsch decorative paintings, alongside Mark Wright’s luminous paintings that crackle like fireflies in the forest night.

And also, in a radical new departure, Jon Braley will be presenting his first figurative works, with images of humans and their animal familiars carved into the surface of the painting in a manner similar to woodcuts.


© Simon Burton 2019