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Timothy Taylor is happy to current New Shapes, a brand new exhibition by British artist Sahara Longe, on view on the London gallery by way of July 8, 2023. That is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and first solo exhibition within the UK, which might be adopted by a solo presentation of work at Frieze Seoul in September 2023. The title, New Shapes, alerts a newly geometric departure within the artist’s compositions.
In Longe’s new physique of labor, extremely stylized abstraction overlays a documentary strategy. Just like the British painter L.S. Lowry, whose cartoon-like crowd scenes of business English staff influenced Longe, the artist takes the on a regular basis for inspiration: the group passing by way of her native Brixton practice station, sports activities, places of work, or individuals strolling on the street. Although Longe offers no trace of context, her work give a way of peering right into a vitrine, a voyeuristic act each hidden and revealed. They burn with quiet sympathy for the women and men she interprets, and their incapability to achieve previous their very own dissociation.
The work recall odd social rituals, but Longe imbues these scenes with discomfiting, uncanny summary kinds that allude to up to date city tensions. In Police Man (2023), a large-scale dipytch, ghostly silhouettes confront a blue-suited London police officer. As in a lot of Longe’s works, figures gaze previous each other as if unaware of the presence of others, their clean expressions, bell-shaped coats and attire, and frieze-like association conspiring to distance them from the viewer.
Longe’s curiosity in society as a form of efficiency or facade has a robust custom in post-war British portraiture. In Workplace (2023), a diptych set in an workplace, three women and men in darkish fits float round a black dice recalling the invisible cages of Francis Bacon’s Nineteen Fifties portraits, which referenced levels or arenas as metaphors for the repression of city life. Although Longe offers no trace of context, her work give a way of peering right into a vitrine, a voyeuristic act each hidden and revealed. They burn with quiet sympathy for the women and men she interprets, and their incapability to achieve previous their very own dissociation.
Painted in comfortable, murky shades of cobalt inexperienced, blue, and crisp cadmium white, Longe’s work take a pared-down and targeted strategy to social documentation. “They’re snapshots of individuals,” Longe explains of the collection. “I think about what persons are doing, and saying, and create my very own story about what their lives may be like.”
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