Christopher Cook Purgatory 2010 natural pigment on aluminium £1200
Angelina May Davis Landscape Study 2020 watercolour and crayon on paper £750
Angelina May Davis Island 2024 crayon on paper £750
Iain Andrews Le Grand Guignol 2013 oil on panel £2500
Iain Andrews And so the Beast was Stirred… 2016 oil on panel £500
Iain Andrews Morghast 2020 NFS
Iain Andrews The Last Show 2016 oil on panel £500
Richard Kenton Webb Icarus Triptych 2017 oil on panel - framed £9000
Icarus detail
Christopher Cook Not to rise again 1998 oil on panel £2200
Christopher Cook Small Pilgrimage Mountain 1993 oil on panel £1000
Christopher Cook Pilgrimage Mountain 1993 oil on panel poa
Richard Kenton Webb Integrity and Awareness V 2017 oil on panel - framed £3000
The exhibition title is taken from the famous epic poem by John Milton, in which he reimagines the Christian account of the Satanic rebellion in Heaven, and the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.
Paradise Lost is also known for its broad intellectual framework, inventive language and radical themes, which permitted Milton to speak of the dilemmas of free will and free speech - a visionary message that has chimed down through the ages, inspiring among other things, the American Declaration of Independence.
The exhibition includes past and current work by five painters: Iain Andrews; Christopher Cook; Angelina May Davis; Mahali O’Hare; and Richard Kenton Webb; and features a guest work by the late Ken Kiff. The paintings have been selected to respond to ideas within Paradise Lost, including notions of desire, of perfection, of transition, and especially of a distancing from authentic interaction with landscape, lucidly evoked by the expulsion from Eden.
The conceptual bubble of the garden, once burst, spawns multiple contemporary concerns, such as environmental degradation, climate change, and the commodification of landscape, and hence the dominant strategy within the exhibition is one of demonstrating the distance between the viewer and the landscapes depicted. This yearning for authenticity, for a lost paradise, is thereby emphasised by its apparent remoteness in the images, a landscape variously contained by vitrines, vases, stages and domes.
November 2024 marked the 350th anniversary of Milton’s death, yet his vision remains burningly relevant to our contemporary age, a relevance that infuses the imagery in this exhibition.
Click to watch the guided tour…
Exhibiting artists:
Iain Andrews won the Jackson's Painting Prize, (Mind’s Eye category) in 2023 and was shortlisted for the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize in 2020. Recent solo (and two person) exhibitions include Divine Comedies (with Carolein Smit) at James Freeman Gallery London (2024), Diorama (with David Hancock) at The Parsonage, Manchester (2023) and New Paintings, Gallery 339, Cao Chang, Beijing (2022). Group exhibitions include Humana at Gallery Gaburro, Milan, Dreams and Nightmares Boomer Gallery, London, and Assembly at Rye Creative Centre, Sussex. Two paintings in the exhibition reference Milton’s life, and employ, as Andrews puts it “a shallow, theatrical space to imagine what a Medieval mystery play or opera would look like, were it to mould together the narratives of Paradise Lost, Grimm's Faery Tales and the crisis of contemporary painting”. A recent work evokes a more Satanic realm.
Christopher Cook studied at the Royal College of Art, London. Major solo shows include Camden Arts Centre, Heidelberger Kunstverein, Towner Gallery Eastbourne, Yokohama Museum of Art, and Memphis Museum of Art, USA. Collections include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Yale Center for British Art, the British Museum and Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge. He is represented by Mary Ryan Gallery, New York and Chini Gallery, Taipei. Two works in this exhibition are from a period when Cook was about to give up colour for monochrome, which for this context he considers a metaphor for expulsion - one that is deliberate and made in full awareness of the consequences. His use of the ‘snow-shaker’ dome-form rhymes with Webb’s vitrines and O’Hare’s vases, and creates an environment hermetically-sealed and distinct from everyday reality - as a painting may, or may not, be.
Angelina May Davis took her MA at the University of Central England and after a period of motherhood, studied with Turps Banana from 2020 to 2022. She has appeared in the BEEP Painting show (2020) and Bloomberg New Contemporaries (2021) whilst recent exhibitions include Stop the Chaos, Turn the Page, at Paradise Works, Manchester; Scrit Terrace Gallery London; Jackson’s Shortlist Exhibition, Bankside, London; and Assembly, Contemporary British Painting in Rye (all 2024.) Davis now lives and works in Birmingham, UK. Her paintings are fabrications, plundering imagery from childhood TV and art history, and here she uses illusions of collage and staging to construct landscapes of the mind that speak of the powerful influence of the human imagination, which has its corollary in the way humankind may exert control over the environment to damaging effect.
Mahali O’Hare was an award winner at Exeter Contemporary Open in 2019 and was selected for the Contemporary British Painting prize in 2022. Her recent solo exhibitions include Songbirds at Bosse & Baum London (2023), Shepherdess at Rook Contemporary (2022) and We Stood Around at Plough Arts Centre Torrington (2021). O’Hare lives in Bristol, working from a studio at Spike Island. She habitually employs a vase form to contain her intimate depictions of pastoral scenes, setting the internal narrative at a distance. These painterly versions of the Greek-vase model often incorporate figures and couples in bucolic environments, and in this context relate to the idea of an encapsulated Eden, with the separateness of the vase, suggestive of an unattainable idyll, adding bathos to her playful, joyful images.
Richard Kenton Webb studied in London at Chelsea School of Art, the Slade School and the RCA. In 2022 he won the Sunny Art Prize, and was also awarded an Albers residency in the USA. Recent solo exhibitions include: Benjamin Rhodes Arts, London (2023), and Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes, Drawings, Milton’s Cottage, Chalfont St Giles (2024). Group exhibitions include: About the Narrative in Painting, LUCA, Ghent; and Emergence: Art and The Incarnation of Space, Martin Museum of Art, Texas, USA (2024). In 2020 he was appointed Subject Leader of Painting, Drawing & Printmaking at Arts University Plymouth. For over a decade, Webb’s work has been inspired by Milton, and many works explicitly referential. Others employ more oblique subjects, as here in the use of a vitrine to distance the image from viewer and source text, an allegorical comment on the human experience of love, hope, despair and enlightenment.