Pŏp-ū-lar, adj. Of the people. To welcome the public back to the gallery, an exhibition of pictures of people. Here are images of women and men, superheroes and villains, lovers and strangers, ancestors and friends. In their depictions of the human face, the human form, and the human condition, all the artists, in their different ways, have responded not only to the challenge of their subject matter but also to the pervasive – and diverse - influence of Pop Art, perhaps the dominant strain in contemporary visual culture.
There is the daring, sometimes anti-naturalistic, use of colour in the works of John Holcomb and Mersuka Dopazo, or in the Non-Western paintings of Coixe Bob, Norman Kingsley and Jimmy Pike; the elements of selective simplification in the nudes of Nikoleta Sekulovic and the portraits of Carla Kranendonk; the photographic reportage of Jim Marshall; the subversive playfulness of Phil Shaw and Jerry Jeanmard; the gleeful appropriations of Andrew Mockett and Rose Blake; the subtle cultural borrowings of Sophie Charalambous and Emma Haworth; and the huge visual energy of all the above. These are images to engage the eye and lift the spirit.
