'Adrift', 2007
oil on acrylic on canvas, 155cm x 122cm
'Array', 2007
oil on acrylic on canvas, 155cm x 122cm
Patricia Hagen's clusters of multicoloured lifeforms huddle at the bottom of tawny photo-studio backdrops. "Scatter", "Adrift", "Array": the titles of her paintings are vague stabs at the nature of these strange little conglomerations, like the uncertain scribbled notes of a scientist faced with weird bacteria in a petri dish. And it's the pseudo-science of pre-war Surrealism that comes most to mind when looking at her work, most obviously Yves Tanguy, with whom Hagen shares a kind of laconic regard for pictorial niceties, giving her tumid and perforated forms a feathery chiaroscuro and fungal weight.
One inverted L-shaped pink figure recurs, staring out of the painting with a single Gustony eye, blankly waiting to become something: a limb? A bird? A tree? It's all shot through with a highly nuanced synthesis of the certain and the hesitant, and even when the alien/microbes take a literally physical form, as in the porcelain line-up "Gathering", they retain their just-out-of-reach quality, like something just on the verge of becoming something else.
To see more of her work registered on Saatchi Online click here.
Ben Street
Ben Street is a teacher of Art History living in London, and every so often he writes on new and old art for Artnet, Triple Canopy, Art21 and Art Review. He is also a lecturer and storyteller for children aged between 3 and 19 at London's National Gallery, and spends his summers lecturing around Italy for Art History Abroad. Ben is a former educator at the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and started his career packing ice-cream at an ice-cream factory in East Anglia.
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