Group Exhibition of Postgraduates from the Royal College of Art, London at L.L. Contemporary

Featuring Works by Beth Cowey, Felicity Nutt, Jan Valik, Soryun Ahn, Tobias Francis, Toby Rainbird, Yiwen Liu

Installation view of Both, Inwards and Out There – 7 Artists from Royal College of Art in London, L.L. Contemporary, 2024

Both, Inwards and Out There
7 Artists from Royal College of Art in London

August 4 – 25, 2024
L.L. Contemporary, Richmond Hill

Opening Reception: August 4, 2-4pm
No registration required. Refreshments will be provided.

L.L. Contemporary is pleased to announce a group exhibition titled Both, Inwards and Out There, showcasing the work of seven postgraduate artists from Royal College of Art in London, whose works delve into the fluid territories of painting between subjective perception and abstracted sensations, from playful observations to personal reflections.

Feeling and intuition serve as a fundamental yet deeply real basis for these artists’ exploration in painting. Their approaches are shaped by a careful focus on the formal aspects of painting and a thoughtful examination of their personal connections to the world. At the intersection of what is sensed and felt and how these experiences are communicated, the formless and intangible begin to take shape, resulting in the emergence of patterns and structures. Whether figurative or abstract, these works strike a balance between revealing and hiding, transforming personal perceptions into expressions that are both accurate and sincerely dedicated to their true nature. Works on display are visually layered evidence of artists’ respective search(es), individual explorations and dialogues between their own existence and the experiences which shaped them.

Felicity Nutt, Puddles and Pixels: Variation 6, 2024, Watercolor and Pencil on Paper, 21 x 14 inch

While gentle variations of watercolours by Felicity Nutt and playfully coloured oils of Toby Rainbird are formulated through patterns, repetition and rhythm, they also talk about balance and subtleties of perception in the same measure as brushwork, precise composition and subtle humour of works by Beth Cowey and Tobias Francis. Personal or ephemeral encounters are source for both, Soryun Ahn and Yiwen Liu, resulting in Ahn’s atmospheric narrations and ephemerally organic abstraction of Liu’s paintings. And similarly, through fluctuating tensions and evocation of otherness Jan Valik’s paintings oscillate back and forth from autonomous to conjured spaces. Works of all these artists are sensitive responses to the lived complexities, in essence ungraspable and fleeting. Incomprehensible but real, incomprehensible but existing, standing right before one’s (half opened, half closed) eyes.

Painting then is the other time made visible and simultaneously hidden. Both, inwards and out there.

For more information, visit:
www.llcontemporary.com/rca-group-exhibition

Beth Cowey, Untitled (Fruits), 2024, Oil on Panel, 12 x 16 inch

About the Artists

Beth Cowey, a Scottish-born artist from Glasgow, received her BA in Painting and Printmaking from Glasgow School of Art and her MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in London. She engages in experimental and personal explorations through painting, print, collage, and sculptural processes. Cowey examines visual relationships between works through surface, edge, and color, addressing questions of structure, fragment, material encoding, and play, along with the rhetorical, a-parallel logic that exists between them.

Welsh artist Felicity Nutt holds a BA from Aberystwyth University and an MA from the Royal College of Art in London. She creates complex works using simple tools like line and color in grid formations. By exploring line spacing and color combinations, she investigates how materials impact perception. Using delicate materials such as watercolor and colored pencil, she layers incrementally to create shifting surfaces that highlight nuances often missed in daily life.

Jan Valik approaches and considers his paintings as fluid and psychological territories moving between perceptual ambiguities, emotions and evocations of otherness. Held in a strange balance and uncertain of fixed meanings, these works are indirect or fragmented responses to the world in flux of contradictions to bypass the subjective to flirt with something universal. Coded in washes of color, impulsive brushstrokes or slowly traced shapes depict and conceal at the same time. He is interested in how external space affects internal space and paints from the point where these two intersect.

Soryun Ahn, The White Bat, 2024, Oil on Canvas, 16 x 22 inch

Soryun Ahn holds a background in fine arts from Korea National University of Arts in Seoul and Braunschweig University of Art in Germany, prior to her advanced studies at the Royal College of Art in London. Her works are grounded in inner fictionality, capturing reality through the intersection of ancient narratives and personal imagination. Her paintings construct new narratives with intimate, autobiographical imagery and enigmatic figures struggling to define their existence. Themes of death, irony, and mystery explore the internal world behind apparent realities.

Tobias Francis holds a BA in Painting from Edinburgh College of Art and an MA from the Royal College of Art in London. His paintings are often small-scale and uniform in size, a deliberate choice that allows him to explore compositional trickery and visual artifice. This approach creates a space where wordplay and paint are lyrically employed. Francis describes his works as puzzles, saying, “When I paint, I reconcile both the trickster and straight shooter in me. I’m drawn to the slipperiness of paint (like language) to elucidate and veil, and question how withholding information can inform more, not less.”

Toby Rainbird holds a BA from Bath School of Art and Design and an MA from the Royal College of Art in London. His practice is characterized by free-spirited, yet self-aware play centered around forms of demarcation and repetition found in commonplace, peripheral spaces. Allowing his work to unfold through trial and error rather than following a premeditated trajectory, Rainbird engages with significant forms while maintaining a deliberate distance from direct or heavily symbolic gestures. Each piece is an accumulation of encounters, reconfiguring tangible articles into a conscious material experience.

Yiwen Liu is a graduate from Central Saint Martins and currently Royal College of Art in London. Her fluid abstractions explore ephemeral and fleeting moments and encounters with an introspective approach to subjectivity of her recollections. Whether people, places or nature, the organic shapes flow in subtle compositions where the enigmatic correlates with the personal and color functions and melts into a state between emotion and atmosphere, memories and presence.

L.L. Contemporary
95 East Beaver Creek Road, Unit 2
Richmond Hill, Ontario L4B 1L4

For more information
Call us at 905-771-0928
Visit us at www.llcontemporary.com
Email us at info@llcontemporary.com

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