Artists' Reception: Friday, September 23, 2011, 5:30 - 7:30pm
Santa Fe, NM — LewAllen Galleries is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Boyd & Evans: Portrait of a Landscape. On view at our Railyard Arts District venue from September 23 – October 30, 2011, the London-based, husband-and-wife team of artists’ first exhibition to be presented at LewAllen Galleries will feature paintings that reflect today’s increasingly complex relationships between the natural and manmade. Featuring Boyd & Evans’ recent paintings, inclusive of many works never before presented in North America, the exhibitions sustains LewAllen Galleries’ established role as an important platform for leading international arts practices.
British artists Fionnuala Boyd and Les Evans have earned significant acclaim for their rigorously constructed paintings and photographs of people and landscapes. As a husband and wife team who have worked together creatively since 1968, Boyd & Evans generate images whose continually evolving aesthetic is characterized by exceptional pictorial clarity and enigmatic narrative possibilities.
Boyd & Evans are avid travelers, culling artistic inspiration from photographic documentation of their experiences abroad. Using these images as a form of archaeological source material, they document signal shifts in our contemporary landscape. The duo merges photo-realism’s transcription of the simultaneous clarity and optical distortions of photographic seeing with a distinctly humanistic dedication to painterly gesture. Emphatically contrasting these visual modes, Boyd & Evans convey the degree to which landscape is a construct of manifold aesthetic conventions that continuously reshape our sense of place.
Fusing the immediacy of snapshot photography with the rigorous compositional logic of traditional scenic painting, the artists actively merge the mundane and the majestic. A station wagon parked at the edge of a mesa precipice, a semiblurred against a Western sunset, the shadows of road-trippers intruding into their own scenic photographs, and similar points of intersection between material culture and natural grandeur inform their singular visual lexicon. Upending our expectations of the landscape genre and the principal sites of its renderings, the artists’ painterly approach untethers the actualities of lived experience from the airbrushed embellishments of cultural memory.
Fionnuala Boyd and Les Evans earned their arts educations at Leeds University and Leeds College of Art, respectively. Regarded among the most important narrative artists working today, their paintings are featured in leading venues internationally. They have garnered numerous significant distinctions including the 2010 Threadneedle Visitors Choice Prize—the UK’s most coveted award for representational art. Actively collected, their work is included in the permanent collections of such notable collections as the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Tate Britain in London, among numerous others. The artists live and work together in Milton Keynes, UK.
For additional information and images, please contact Iris McLister by phone at (505) 988-3250 or via email at [email protected].
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