Float - paintings about time place and memory



Rebecca Hossack Gallery, London.  June 2017

Shells, beetles, glass bottles, feathers, seed pods, keys. The paintings of Queensland artist Allyson Reynolds, with their menagerie of natural textures, seem to draw on the still life tradition of arranging everyday objects into a formal whole. 

Each painting evokes the cluttered worktop of the natural historian’s study, a Wunderkammer of found objects with the painter an eager collector and observer of the organic world, its multiple places and different times. And yet, by suspending each object on a white backdrop, and introducing abstract shapes and blocks of colour, Reynolds makes a more minimalist, contemporary statement. Through this composition, she also draws our attention to the individual as well as the collective and the interplay of connected and contrasting colours.

Using thinned-down oil paints, Reynolds attains the rich density of colour, but is able to capture the translucence and delicacy of her subject matter. The exhibition brings together twelve inter-related canvases and will be the artist's third solo show in London.