21 February 2012

'Drawing Breath' - new exhibition at Cooper Gallery

An exhibition of drawings, photographs and video works by influential Scottish painter Lys Hansen and up-and-coming Teesside artist Kraig Wilson will open at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design next week.

'Drawing Breath' marks the second phase of the Materiality & Metaphysics Series at the Cooper Gallery, DJCAD. It opens on Friday, March 2nd, and runs for the rest of the month.

The exhibition choreographs a body of raw and potent works from the two artists. Their work deals with material that at first appears abstract, but which is in fact the root of daily experience.

Both Hansen and Wilson acknowledge the importance of language and art acting as a form of visual poetry, and Cooper Gallery curator Sophia Hao said that the exhibition put the practice of art on show.

"The images composed by the two artists capture an "illusive breathing space," she said. "This means a moment of clarity where urgent emotions can be held under hand and eye. It is the practice of art that is being exhibited here, and its limitless possibility to give shape and form to emotion and experience.

"Hovering at the edge of materiality, Lys Hansen's drawings push against forgetting and indelibly restate what is continually felt. In Wilson's photographs and video, brief moments are brought to an intimate stillness, revealing the finality of each and every experienced moment."

Drawing is a major part of Lys Hansen's practice, and she says the ones selected for 'Drawing Breath are a "material confrontation with the reality of life and its inherent beauty and truth". Although her large-scale paintings have been exhibited internationally, this exhibition is the first to focus exclusively on her drawings only.

The photographic and video work of Kraig Wilson draws deeply upon the nature of a contemporary melancholia and concentrates on the haunting encounter between the mind and the world. For Wilson, the melancholic is someone that opts out of the "collective rituals in society" and thus reveals much about this society.

'Drawing Breath', an exhibition of work by Lys Hansen and Kraig Wilson takes place at the Cooper Gallery, DJCAD, from 2nd-31st March. A preview event takes place between 6-8pm on Thursday, 1st March, and is open to members of the public.

More information is available by visiting www.dundee.ac.uk/djcad/exhibitions/exhibitions/drawing-breath/.

For media enquiries contact:
Grant Hill
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University of Dundee
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