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Phoebe Unwin: A Short Walk from a Shout to a Whisper

Phoebe Unwin: A Short Walk from a Shout to a Whisper
Library Shelf Location 18.UNWI
Publication Date 2007
Description This publication marks the first major solo exhibition of British painter, Phoebe Unwin at Milton Keynes Gallery in 2007 and brings together a selection of her most recent work. Unwin's paintings shift between figuration and abstraction, between the space of the page and the plane of the canvas. Working incessantly in an A3 sketchbook, the artist creates a personal register of images and marks: observations of reality, constructs of memory or indirect references to particular places and events. Individual pages are worked up simultaneously creating visual dialogues, some obvious, some obscure as Unwin teases and collages images, shapes and forms from the format of the page and materials at hand in pastel, pencil and acrylic. The entire contents of each drawing book, as in The Grand and the Commonplace, 2006, are sometimes displayed collectively as an individual work. On the one hand Unwin's practice appears highly conventional; the drawing book providing impressions for future paintings, often larger in scale and rendered in oil and acrylic. On the other, her approach seems more akin to a literary tradition of composition making or a musical fugue – fuelled with visual echoes and counterpoint. Unwin's paintings each have their own autonomy yet possess a clear genetic and familial link such that the entire breadth of her output has no specific hierarchical order. There are recurring motifs that suggest an autobiographical thread; sunglasses, modernist geometrical forms and portraits – one of the images depicts a person blushing in the dark, a glowing face with black impasto eyelids. Throughout her work the artist creates a counterpoint between explosive abstracted paintings and a darker, often sinister psychological interior space.
ISBN 9780955344091
Quantity 1
Pages 48
Editors Michael Stanley, Emma Dean
Author Mark Henry
Format Paperback
Publisher Milton Keynes Gallery
Related Artist Phoebe Unwin
Category Painting
Artist's Nationality British/UK
Language English

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