A highly evocative and materially seductive show. The artist is exceptionally knowledgeable on pigments (this may provide a thematic link to the Colour exhibition currently on at the National Gallery) using them to subtle effect creating Flowers that works as portraits and Momento Mori.
The work on show would cause great pleasure nature and plant enthusiasts as well as much of the Broader London Art scene. Hannah Maybank Graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1999
Hannah Maybank’s exhibition is a fecund encyclopedia of material accumulations. Fine mineral dust, as fine as silky smokey soot. Makes me think of the infinite return to dust; the painting – Adeline, is prominent and life affirming, radiating positively, inviting, bold and vibrant, raw blue pigment comes through naked, to a quieter subtle, positively projecting.
Material and visual slippages here echo content. In Kate, earthy, silt-like, brush strokes remind of the slow subtle and seductive processes of rivers silting, soft & silky. Creating allusive movement. The weight of the pigment is carried by the vehicle of its suspension, until it gives out and separates. What I enjoy of the work is the deft vocabulary of materials used, as materiality and rendered form used Versus the semiotic Sign of the object. Maybank is working at the precipitous point of how do things appear manifest, take on recognisable form, how they carried on and persist as affect.
Tussock seems a painting composed entirely of traces of white on white, more delicate than a leaf mark on a white sands beach. as if an archaeological brush dusted through Marble powered finer than powdered icing sugar. Light rippling through in gentle wakes. It’s remarkable so much richness that can be hidden in so flat a surface. It’s especially effective when viewed in the quite of the night.
The experience of her flowers, lingering more fulsomely than ghosts. Their presence perhaps, has more to do with the nature and the exercise of memory, an essay on the maintenance of attention, and the return of forms recollected to the present.
Maybank’s earlier series, contained elements that mirror the natural pleasure of the gaze in movement, the return of echoing forms employed via playful symmetries that displace expectations, by shifting and changing elements. The work is restrained, yet the flowers purposefully bleed; as an experienced gardener would plan for growth Maybank uses ‘Time’ as she would any other material. Maybank’s works are profuse with subtle dynamic movement. Her allusive lacuna, absences, suggestive of formal & instinctual affects of visual language. Effective in the manner they cease and seize, weaving in and out of existence, such as in the painting Tussock. Seductive, filled with mystery, magic, suspense and slow reveal. I wonder what Hannahs magic would add to future editions of the Chelsea flower show.
Flowers as motif of life’s tendency to abundance and generator of chance. Winds of highly successful cross pollinations have always swept through the arts. In the first ever detective novel, by Wilkie Collins – The Moonstone, created the working class inspector is marked out by his appreciation of the cultivation Rose flowers. Emerging embodying reason, science, deduction, classification and class. These themes already underly in tension, in the embryonic genre of the detective novel.
In the deep moody haunting of the short story La Horla – by Guy De Maupassant, the protagonist realises they are trapped in an ornate room, with a ghost by noticing a floating rose. The flower motif appears provides clear relief from absorption. Through the episodic surprise of a returned motif (Rose). Through touching on the shock of forgetting oneself. The memory of this realisation is transferred to a returned lost state or detail. Flowers celebrate & commemorate, in ancient times Orpheus noted funerary baskets that top Corinthian capitals, were copied from a young girls offering to a departed sibling.
Flowers are forms whose life begins closed. In Maybank’s hands they explode open; welcoming, gentle,full of hints & blushes, instinctually and sculpturally wild. Open to arrangement and endless rearrangement. Open to play and to clear conventions of meaning.
There are other Hidden histories such as how flower arranging influenced William S.Burroughs and subsequently affected postmodernism, collage cut ups and David Bowie. Maybank’s certain painting are named after people, on which I alight on how Proust collected people, in the way that his father collected botantical specimens.
The abundance of detailed form and negative spaces in Maybank’s work, along with its symmetry has the potential to overwhelm. leads me to imagine possible relations with the hyper detail of Richard Dadd or the botanical hallucinatory intricacy of the extreme objective style of 19th Century painter American Frederic Edwin Church.
It is a sign of great confidence from Gimpel Fils gallery in Hannah Maybank, giving her two solo shows in a year.
I confess much time has passed on worthy causes (Oxfam & Fairtrade), since last seeing Hannah Maybank’s work at her September opening. All the work is new. It”s a Strong body of work. I am startled by times passing, so marked vitally, populated with these still lives of flowers. It’s a personal moment of instruction that hits, with a Momento Mori, never experienced as a personal reminder. Time in her hands has been turned to an abundance. Every second counted, having worked up to the last minute of the shows opening.
On til 6 July 2014
As a celebration of the exhibition and to coincide with the launch of her catalogue, Hannah Maybank will be in conversation with Dr Alice Correia on Sunday 6th July at 1pm.
http://www.gimpelfils.com/pages/exhibitions/exhibition.php?exhid=109&subsec=2
Gimpel Fils will be participating in the London Art Weekend along with other galleries in Mayfair and St James’s on Saturday 5th July and Sunday 6th July.
The Blog article is a longer – 900 word article version of the 400 word article that appeared in the Camden Review on July 1st
http://www.camdenreview.com/hannah-maybank-bobhowlers-and-blooms-at-gimpel-fils