Interview with Jake Wood-Evans

27/02/20

Interview with Jake Wood-Evans

Jake Wood-Evans: Relic

The Gallery, Winchester Discovery Centre

10 January – 29 March 2020

Entering the Gallery at Winchester Discovery Centre is currently something like entering a church or sacred space. The lighting is low and focused on the large, arch-topped canvases, created especially for this exhibition by Hastings-based artist Jake Wood-Evans.

Wood-Evans’s work derives from his fascination with the baroque, especially, in this instance, with the grand altarpieces by the likes of Rubens and Van Dyck. However, after marking out the basic figuration of his version of the painting he is working from, he then sets about removing elements, pushing the paint about in its fluidity, mixed with turps and linseed oil. His resulting imagery sits somewhere between figuration and abstraction – with an element of the meditative – inviting viewers to bring their own interpretation and narrative to the traces and relics of what has been, both on Wood-Evans’s own canvases, and on the canvases of the original paintings, with the passing of time, added layers of varnish, and restorative work, all leaving their mark. 

Studio International spoke to Wood-Evans about his inspirations and his process.

Watch the interview here

Review of After White: Michaela Zimmer and Peter Welz at Fold Gallery, London

18/02/18

After White: Michaela Zimmer and Peter Welz 

Fold Gallery, London

2 February – 10 March 2018

Fold Gallery in Fitzrovia, London, might be so-called for good reason – an awkward configuration to curate, it literally folds around the corner, creating an L-shape, in which it is impossible to step all that far back from most of its walls. It is the perfect space, however, for the current installation, which comprises paintings by Michaela Zimmer (b1964, Berlin) and an architectural-cum-sculptural intervention by her fellow Berlin-based colleague Peter Welz (b1972, Lauingen, Germany). Working together, they have turned the space into a bisected corridor, a climbing frame (although I am not sure that climbing would be encouraged), or discarded scaffold, which visitors are required to walk through, becoming a part of the work, interrupting and intervening themselves.

Read the full review here

Review of Ana Mendieta: Traces at the Hayward Gallery

03/10/13

Ana Mendieta: Traces

Hayward Gallery

Southbank Centre

24 September – 15 December 2013

Despite leaving behind an archive of over 1000 slides and 60 films, as well as myriad drawings and sculptures, Ana Mendieta’s name sadly usually only crops up in relation to the tragic and untimely – not to mention suspicious – circumstances of her death. 

In 1985, aged just 36, when she fell from a window of the 34^th floor apartment that she shared with her artist husband, Carl Andre, whom she’d married less than eight months previously. Given the tempestuous nature of their relationship, exacerbated by her growing success, many believe she was pushed. Andre was charged with her murder but acquitted after the third trial. The suggestion of suicide has been dismissed as unthinkable by her family and friends, but many critics have, regardless, analysed her work, in particular her Silueta series, as a rehearsal for death: uncannily, the way in which she fell on to the roof of the delicatessen below mirrors the outlined silhouette shape, with one arm raised in a stylised pose reminiscent of the Great Goddess, of so much of her work. 

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/ana-mendieta