Prolonged engagement with these serene and elegant drawings reward the viewer revealing more and more detail and complexity in both their construction and psychological presence

Inventive drawings sourced from imagination and from Science Museum machines proposing slender vertical cities.

These artists have in common a love of paint and relate their experiments with the medium to both the history of painting and contemporary themes. While Robin Dixon explores the physical mysteries of matter and energy, Karen Douglas engages with our psychological relationship to nature.

Dave Farnham creates images reflecting on the representation, rather than the truth of War; (what Owen calls “the old lie”). An exploding field of valour where courage and moral fortitude overcome death.
Although we soon realise these images are deliberate fakes, somehow they defy our reason, creating a powerful and emotionally convincing presence.

New graduate and young artists depict stories derived from their experiences of London life. Danger, anger, catharsis, and absurdity sit side by side in this entertaining show

Anka Dabrowska revisits her childhood with images that reference Poland in the era of martial law. Communism meets consumerism in these quirky drawings made on paper bags.

In this, her first solo exhibition, Dawn Shorten brings together cloud paintings with map based objects called ‘conic projections’. Together they show a respect, even a sense of anxiety, in the face of nature’s greatest displays. The portrayal of storms, rocks and wave surges can be seen as metaphors for the trials of human existence.

 

In Emma Holden's work natural and manmade materials cohabit outside of their normal context questioning the fixed rules and meanings that we apply to our everyday experiences. The notion that the disposable is undesirable is binned and the honesty of her production is laid bare. Her passion for nature and the internal logic of organic structures is played out as she breathes new life into discarded and domestic materials such as Christmas trees, polystyrene and brown paper.

B.S.T. (British Summer Time), is an off- centre look at summertime experiences by four accomplished painters. The show includes Karen Douglas's large landscape "Polytunnels", in which greenhouses take on another identity and suggest futuristic protection from the elements. In Mark Wright's mysterious painting, partially submerged and synthetic trees, coincidently connect to climate change and recent flooding. Camilla Wilson's "After Manet" depicts a figure who may be sunbathing, sleeping or dead. Andrew Griffiths references English eccentricity and gardens as a space for unplanned encounters.

A microcosm of the current Art Market.

Mikey Cuddihy shares her time between fictional writing and the visual arts. In this show tiny ephemeral doodles undergo a transition to become dramatically enlarged ink drawings on translucent paper or exhuberant and colourful painted paper cut-outs

Julie Cockburn makes creative interventions in the old books, out of date maps and magazines that she accumulates. Patiently and beautifully crafted, these essentially flat objects explode into sculptural collages. She introduces ideas to found objects that generate dialogues about modernity and art history, gender and identity, nature and urbanity and the relationship between process and idea. Cockburn avoids being didactic by a deftness of touch and a lively wit that wills her audience to engage with and enjoy her work.

Robin Dixon's inventive and unusual compositions, make visible unseen energies such as radio waves and theoretical structures underpinning cloud formations.

Rachel Labovitch describes the sensation of forms emerging and dissolving in mist.

Caroline List‘s interpretation of landscape is influenced by both our direct engagement and collective memory. Exploring the relationship between photography and the process of painting, her work hovers between fact and fiction.

 

Jay Patel,
Lousie Colbourne,
Luigi Rizzo,
Lyn Lowestein,
Matej Modrinjak,
Monika Dutta,
Nora Adwan,
Sharon Wilson,
Sheena Macrae,
son:Da,
Stuart Simpson,
The Collective.

This show brings together and contrasts the large paintings of Mark Wright and the intimate canvases of Mandy Hudson. The artists share an interest in relationships between the natural world and the urban environment.Mandy Hudson's work is often poignant describing the fragility of nature within the city.
Mark wright's elegant and inventive paintings combine references to science ,technology, and nature in an aesthetic environment.

 

. . . anything inside a no-ship is hidden from prescient vision and other methods of detection . . .
this happens because no-ships fold space to travel nowhere very fast . . .
they move so quickly it's impossible to see exactly what it is that they are doing unless you are actually there.

GABRIELLE MOTOLA internationally acclaimed photographer documents the people, politics and dynamic of Broadway Market. For the past three years she has been photographing the residents and visitors to Broadway Market, documenting the changing mix of people.

The show contained an auto portrait studio enabling visitors to have their image incorporated into the show as part of an ongoing series of projections.

An art event involving 60 artists, taking place in 4 venues across the UK, questioning the values assigned to place and negating physical distance by linking cities through a common theme. www.conjunctiongroup.org

Artists from diferent cultural backgrounds investigating displacement and identity.

STEM is a "living" screen system; it will grow and evolve its physical qualities (shape, transparency, breathing potential) out of its relationship with sun light; light will be filtered and captured for photosynthetic operations; oxygen will be produced and carbon dioxide adsorbed; more light will result into more oxygen production and more screening potential; less light will turn into less photosynthesis and more transparency; will STEM be flexible enough to find a positive equilibrium within the gallery environment? Will people be able to enjoy the hyper oxygenated softly lit cocoon generated by STEM or constant artificial intervention will be required? Will STEM constitute an example of a successful “artificial ecology”?

‘pardon’ an installation by Hana Sakuma winner of the CEN Award for Visual Arts

CEN Magazine celebrates and reports on the arts and creative industries in East London. Seven Seven nominated Hana Sakuma for CEN magazine’s first annual awards that took place in November 2005.

Hana Sakuma’s work is typified by a heightened sensibility and thoughtfulness that quietly and persistently engages her audience. Her own poetic description of the piece for Seven Seven, which forms part of the installation, announces the work perfectly.

Against a sky blue background lots of bells have been stacked.
People can sit on the chair and wait. Eventually the bells fall off.
As they do, they make a tinkling noise. Glued to the wall, the bells lose
their function, they are silent, held captive. Only when they fall do they
regain their power and as they tumble the work slowly decays.

 

For a variety of reasons artists may draw behind the scenes of their best-known public practice. depending on the artist they may wish to diversify their practice and explore another area. The drawings may have a function in the development of projects. The artist may have a primeval instinct to engage with materials, narrative or description. Or simply, the drawings may be made for recreation.

The concept of the Zombie turns up at every level of contemporary culture, from the most lucid horror movie to the philosophic skirmishing of Dualists and Materialists. It is an idea so instantly graspable yet so undermining to our natural reason that it fascinates the meta-physicists and the pre-pubescent boy equally.

Through a series of systematic processes of production, the artists reveal within repetition an attempt at individuality. Between hand to paper, description to
paper, and description via machine, there is a chain reaction of uncertainty that undermines reality's apparent veracity.

Letters Home from Taiwan, Lost Soles from Nepal and Stairwells in Edmonton form the subject of this innovative photo installation.

Unsentimental and depicting a sought for loneliness, these drawings explore the interconnectedness of the elements of landscape drawing.

 

Liz Brooker's 'down at the station - images of Indian rail'

As part of a six-month photographic sojourn to India, Liz Brooker traversed 20,000km documenting the quieter moments of the Indian Railway Journey Experience

Jessica Parker's 'serenity found'

Jessica Parker believes what is openly observed in our environment has a tangible and intangible impact. Shot on a 1960’s toy-camera, Parker’s images of the New Zealand landscape create a visual and emotional history and record her own sense of calm, freedom and joyfulness

http://www.exposed.co.nz/

These young artists from Maribor, Slovenia are representatives of the dynamic and creative energy that is emerging throughout the New Europe. In this show they investigate the local context as a source for an answer in the search for identity.

Continental Breakfast Maribor is one of the exhibitions under the umbrella of international project Continental Breakfast, which links together more than 12 organisation from 11 European countries working in the field of contemporary art, ranging from visual and performing arts to literature and music. Participating institutions are Belgrade Cultural Centre, Serbia and Montenegro; BM Contemporary Art Centre, Istanbul, Turkey; Institute for Contemporary Art, Zagreb, Croatia; Kunsthalle Wien, Austria; UGM, Slovenia; Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest, Hungary; MUSEUM, Institute for Art Production, Distribution and Publishing, Ljubljana, Slovenia; Tallinn Art Hall, Estonia; Teine Tants, Tallinn, Estonia; Trieste Contemporanea, Italy; Villa Manin, Centre for Contemporary Art, Passariano, Italy and Seven Seven Contemporary Art, London.
'Maribor Art Gallery (UGM)'

Three photographers, each with a themed exhibition, dominated the three spaces of Seven Seven.

Its October, the show has a warm red glow.

Scented by Stephen Felmingham’s warming and cooling honey-filled vessels and illuminated by Camilla Wilson’s East End Orange monochromes this show…….

National Open Drawing Prize and Arboreta Student Sketchbook Award.

An exhibition of contemporary artist’s sketchbooks and works on paper.

SKETCH 2005 selected 47 sketchbooks and 13 framed drawing collations by 49 local, national and international artists from over 250 entries for the exhibition.

The diverse collection of sketchbooks and framed collations of related drawings represented in the exhbition includes Sasha Leech (SKETCH 2005 Drawing Prize Winner), Karen Lorenz, Foster Spragge and Sandy Sykes (Short-listed for the SKETCH 2005 Drawing Prize, Amy Green (Arboreta Student Sketchbook Award prize winner) and Leo Duff.

‘Connecting Spaces’ is an exhibition of new work by the emerging multi-disciplinary artist Kezia Cantwell-Wright. The exhibition comprises photographs, drawings and interactive sculptures. The former explores the geometry and structure of modernist architecture, and the relationships between different elements, which acts as a metaphor for the relationships between sections of society. The drawings quote both architecture and puzzles, such as Rubik’s cube, in their exploration of geometry and spatial relationships, presenting the city as something that can be taken apart and put back together in another formation. Finally Kezia’s new sculptures, a hybrid between construction toys, such as Lego, and architectural models, allow viewers to explore the urban landscape for themselves by playing with the given forms and colours.

The postmodern emphasis on interpretation and reference has spawned a generation of artists that have worked so extensively with readymade and appropriated material, that the actual engagement between ideological and physical materials is reduced to a mere incidence. While the creative commitments of the exhibiting artists preclude them from producing anything conceivably documentary, their work represents a tangible commitment to the search for engaging subject matter.

An exhibition featuring photographic work, collage and drawings by Jane Thurley and Ann Marie Peña (in collaboration with Dora Longo Bahia).
Jane Thurleys' creates collages . These large-scale collages depict scenes of city parks and other forms of created nature from layering specifically chosen wallpapers. She is interested in the effect of urbanisation on tradition.
Ann Marie Peña uses photography and found images to produce works that reference architecture, communication and urban environments. Here, in collaboration with Brazilian Artist Dora Longo Bahia, she has created a photographic installation comprised of images taken over a three-month period in South Africa. They question the role of nature in city centres and consider how nature is often consumed and manipulated to suit, and disguise, the needs of urban development.

This place…have I been here before?
Ideas of longing and belonging beyond the everyday, are explored from different viewpoints, combining animation, origami, sculpture and 2D works.

Theresa Mikuria, a Japanese-Taiwanese photographer known in East Asia both as an artist and for her work in the fashion and music industries, presents her first UK solo exhibition at the Seven Seven Gallery in London. The photographs here vary widely: locations include San Francisco, Hong Kong, Taipei, Solan (India), Tokyo, North Carolina; the subject-matter ranges from Buddhist ceremony to dilapidated machinery via bucketfuls of squid; colour portraits appear in the same room as long-exposure pinhole polaroids and black and white still lifes. Yet the works here are united by a single common thread, evident in every image: the photographer’s love for both her subjects and the photographic medium itself.

Hometown is an exhibition of new drawings on paper and photographs of miniature interiors by Anka Dabrowska.
Autobiographical, it concerns merging ideas of memory and imagination in relation to her upbringing in Poland.

As part of our international programme three artists
from Seven Seven presented 'Fold up the Sky' at AKA
Gallery in Rome . The show explored ideas about
creation and destruction

Unnerving, enchanting, shamelessly idiosyncratic. Every image has a secret hinge, an opening from the physical world - a Lilliput gaggle behind the eye, an opaque memory that greys and cracks and crumbles.

 

Mike Griffiths life affirming paintings of familial love avoid the sentimental with their brave and expressionist use of paint and their inventive compositions.

image detail.

Paintings made where nature converges with the urban environment. Gritty interpretations of urban transport systems combine with memory and photography. All executed in thin, thick and very thick paint

This show reflected new energy in Italy ’s contemporary art scene. Seven artists deal with ideas of opposition and resolution.

Subordinating the pleasure principle to the reality principle is done through a psychological process Freud calls SUBLIMATION, where you take desires that can't be fulfilled, or shouldn't be fulfilled, and turn their energy into something useful and productive.

-Mary Klages

Five artists created an installation divided in three; a presentation room, a monster-container and a dark basement.