Wilkinson Gallery is pleased to present the first solo show of London based artist, Phoebe Unwin. Unwin’s practice consists of two parallel processes. In the first she makes works within books as if the pages are canvases, continually flipping from one work to another. In some, it is as if she is trying to exhaust the possibilities of reworking the image using pastel, pencil acrylic and collage, in others she leaves a sparse gesture or mark to punctuate the more densely formed works. As in “The Grand and the Commonplace”, 2006, in the front space, the works in the books are perceived as one from the beginning and this process results in an image bank, creating a vocabulary - a group of works on paper which for Unwin are born as a whole.
The paintings are generated from this process, using the images, colours or gestures that evolve in the drawings. They are diverse in form and structure - some such as “Man Blushing in the Dark”, 2006, use intense colours with thickly painted layers and others such as “Untitled : Grey Landscape”, 2006, are less figurative with gentle stokes of watered down acrylic. They all, however, evolve from the same language as the drawings - images not taken from photographs or direct art historical self reference, but from Unwin’s incessant enquiry into the relationship between material and image.
