Last week a new gallery opened on Redchurch Street in Spitalfields, joining Museum 52, studio 1.1 and Trolley in making this a 'destination' street on the London East End art circuit. The Vegas Gallery, run by Suzanne Schurgers, a former student of the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, aims to show the work of young artists, often recently graduated, who haven't exhibited their work before in London.
The artist Schugers has selected to launch the new space is Geraldine Gliubislavich who was born in 1978 and graduated from Central Saint Martin's School of Art (Byam Shaw) in 2006 with a Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art. Before coming to London Gliubislavich was a student at the Ecole Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Strasbourg where her degree show attracted a special mention from the examiners.
Her show at the Vegas Gallery presents 15 canvases exhibited amidst a makeshift installation of empty cardboard boxes, freshly painted white canvases, wooden stretcher bars and one painting turned in towards the wall. Gliubislavich's paintings often begin with a photograph of a distinct image which the artist then 'contaminates' with paint, creating a pictorial dimension that lies somewhere between reality and the imagination - 'the afterworld' of the exhibition's title. Her work hints at narrative and the figurative, as does the installation, whilst also creating abstract texture which remains deliberately vague. The paintings appear to depict scenes of desolation, unrest and loneliness, which are counter-balanced by Gliubislavich's seductive use of paint, the way she plays with zones of texture and brightness.
The apparently random arrangement of canvases and boxes and her palette of smokey grey, black, muddy brown and white take the eye back and forth from one painting to the next, surveying the constellation of objects on view. Gliubislavich cites the writing of Umberto Eco as an inspiration behind this system of open-ended interconnections. In his book "Open Work" (1962), Eco attempts to demonstrate that a work of art is an ambiguous message, open to an infinity of interpretations. A text - and, for Gliubislavich, a painting - is not a finite object, but on the contrary an "open" object that the reader cannot receive passively and which demands of him an effort of imagination and interpretation. Gliubislavich's work explores the individual painting as an object, testing the limits of painting and feeding off the fertile relationships which gradually evolve as each subsequent painting joins those that preceed it.
Geraldine Gliubislavich: The Afterworld
Until 11 February
Vegas Gallery
Oaklands
64-66 Redchurch Street
London E2 7DP
T: +44 (0)207 729 4819
The opening hours are 11.00-19.00 every day except for Monday when the gallery is closed.
All images courtesy the artist and the Vegas Gallery.
