Büyükdere35 Gallery will host “Trans-idyllic: Recent paintings, digital animations and prints by Diana Page”, curated by Lewis Johnson, from Tuesday 12 through Saturday 30 September. Opening night is set to start at 18:00.
From the curator, Lewis Johnson:
This upcoming show of some of Diana Page’s mostly recent paintings, digital animations and prints offers an opportunity to re-engage with something distinctive among the potentialities of the art of painting and derivative arts. For too long rather under-estimated, in interest as well as in importance, this distinctive potentiality may be signaled by the notion of the idyllic.
Who would not acknowledge the potential of painting to communicate a sense of the idyllic? There are genres of painting in many cultures that explore ideals of place or locale. The work on show this September in Büyükdere35 by South African artist and Istanbul resident Diana Page can remind us of the qualified status to the idealization that makes for the idyll, however: something of uncertain duration, if not essentially brief, and of uncertain extent, traceable in the history of Western culture and, in particular, in a history of modern painting.
Stylistically various, Page’s work nevertheless calls up that history in a series of inventive re-engagements with depictions of place and locale. Through the powers of pigment suggestive of ideally pleasurable, but also variously exposed, unstable, damaged, transitory locations and places, her work offers up what we can term the ‘trans-idyllic’: something that carries us in and out of a sense of the idyllic and the counter-idyllic, with the effect of opening these limits up to our sense of movement from place to place and thus towards a sharing of our experience of places as such.
The selection of larger and smaller paintings thus shows the artist putting inherited vocabularies of modern painting to the test in the task of negotiating utopic and dystopic understandings of place and locale today. And alongside the paintings, the exhibition will also show some of Page’s recent digital animations and prints that rework the photographic representation of place in the space of its current cultural dominance, the capacitive screen, recalling us to intensities of the communication of senses of pleasure in movement.
The idyll is usually said to identify a genre of shorter poems such as those by Theocritus of the third century B.C.E. that tell of some incident or encounter in the countryside—though written, of course, for those in the city. The term derives from the Greek for ‘little picture’…
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For more information, visit the official gallery page.
Monday – Saturday: 10:00 – 19:00
+90 212 242 5973
info@buyukdere35.com
Featured image courtesy of Diana Page.
Çayırbaşı Mah. Çayırbaşı Cad. No:35 Büyükdere, Sarıyer 34453
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