Mesh

Louise Bristow is a Brighton based painter who regularly exhibits her work in the UK, Japan and Germany. Her most recent project, Platonic just showed at the KALEID Gallery in Redchurch Street, Shoreditch.
And she is currently in a group show at Artists Residence Hotel Brighton.

Bristow’s paintings are landscapes with a difference; she constructs careful tableaux, rich in both formal composition and narrative play, using found imagery of other places, primarily in Northern and Eastern Europe, book covers and hand-made maquettes of real architectural features or fantasy structures. Her arrangements of condensed and re-imagined landscapes evocative of stage sets are often presided over by a geometrical element, recalling Cezanne’s exhortation to ‘treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone’. These forms of assumed perfection betray nostalgia for Modern ideals replete with utopian aspirations that never came to fruition. With Platonic, Bristow has taken this geometric rationalisation one step further. Each arrangement, overlaid and cut with a Euclidean net, offers instructions to fold and stick. Once assembled, each page is transformed into one of the five Platonic Solids: tetra, hedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron and icosahedron.

KALEID’s in house book critic, Redchurch Idler comments on the work; “Louise Bristow evokes the anodyne world of corporate management, its hegemony concealed behind glass facades and atrium art. Assembling her platonic forms i.e cube, tetra-/icosa-/octa-/dodeca-/hedra from cardboard templates, a rudimentary task that involves folding and sticking a series of flaps, mocks the executive decision-making which shapes social reality for the multitude, whilst implying that outcomes, the artificial hives and insane systems mankind has built, are universal default structures. The De Chirico like atmosphere depicted via boardroom toys suggests mankind has become a mere frome in a totalitarian business machine, desperate to recompose the given, to recollect the womb.”

Website:www.louisebristow.com/

Tags: florian, KALEID Gallery, Louise Bristow

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010 at 3:01 pm and is filed under Design & Art, Editor of the Month. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.