The Focus section of the Armory Show on Pier 90 is curated by Jamillah James, Curator, Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Focus is devoted to solo and dual-artist presentations of today’s most relevant and compelling artwork.

WORKPLACE presents two emerging women painters based in the North of England: Louise Giovanelli and Laura Lancaster. Both artists are concerned with the mediation and re-staging of found imagery to address complex issues relating to the image, its origin and multiplicity in a post-truth world.

makes intense, luminous, paintings that refer to art history and contemporary mechanics of viewing and consuming imagery. Cropped and isolated images gleaned from historical painting are repeated and restated, dislocated from their origin and repositioned within a rhizomatic sequence of works. Giovanelli employs a layering technique to build works that simultaneously explore multiple modes of representation and painterly lexicons of flatness, translucence, abstraction and realism.

transposes the discarded photographs of strangers into an ambiguous territory between

abstraction and figuration. Divorcing her subjects from their specific context and time, Lancaster renders these images uncanny and strange. Shifting between the sentimental and the grotesque she relocates them to a place of collective memory. Confronting a gendered history of painting, Lancaster draws upon a range of influences including the work of Francis Bacon, Willem DeKooning, Lovis Corinth, and James Ensor. Lancaster subverts the notion of authorial autonomy, allowing her work to become a conduit through which the lives of the lost and the nameless are connected with our own.

Click here for further information / online viewing room:
https://www.workplacegallery.co.uk/viewing-room/the-armory-show-2020/

Workplace's booth at The Armory Show in 2020 featuring paintings by Laura Lancaster and Louise Giovanelli

The Armory Show

Louise Giovanelli | Laura Lancaster

Related Artists

Louise Giovanelli

Laura Lancaster

London

Newcastle