Other Stories / Sarah Pickstone

CGP London presents the largest solo exhibition to date by British painter Sarah Pickstone. Other Stories brings together new work and selected paintings from the The Writers Series (2013).

The Park has been a central theme to Sarah Pickstone’s work for two decades. It represents an imaginative space for play and exploration, where motifs of willow and rose are drawn alongside references to the act of making; both in painting and writing.

The Writers Series (first shown at the New Art Centre, Salisbury in 2013) investigates this very process of making; acknowledging the canon of women writers through recent history who cited literary connections to Regents Park (including Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, George Eliot and Sylvia Plath). Stevie Smith and the Willow (2011), winner of the John Moores Painting Prize in 2012 is also included in the exhibition.

‘These paintings, lit by their own leafy syntax, by a deep sourced and communal imagination, fuse the mind, art, nature and the thinking spirit into an affirmation as big and unfussed as a sky.’ Ali Smith

The park and the creative process serve as starting points for the new series of large-scale paintings made for this exhibition. This new scheme of work was developed in response to the gallery’s surrounding Southwark Park*. References to Shakespeare’s The Tempest appear in Pickstone’s work of the same title, alluding to themes of political upheaval, the disturbance of nature and the physical act of making art; marked by the fronds of the lakeside willow sitting adjacent to Ada Salter’s Rose Garden (local environmentalist, social reformer and London’s first female Mayor).

Pickstone’s prolific study of roses from 2015 and 2016 form the basis for Rose (2017); a large red rose blooms from the grasp of a stocky fist, sketched from Picasso’s Guernica. Here, Pickstone’s Rose is at once both protest and life force.

Sarah Pickstone was born in Manchester, she lives and works in London. Sarah studied at the University of Newcastle, The Royal Academy of Art and The British School at Rome. Her work has been exhibited extensively across the UK and internationally including The Royal Academy, London; Christie’s Rockerfeller Centre, New York; Museum of the Himalayas, Shanghai; NewArtCentre, Roche Court, Salisbury; The Kukje Gallery, Seoul and the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.

Before winning first prize in the John Moores Painting Prize in 2012, Sarah was also a runner up in 2004. Her work features in major public collections including The Mercer Art Gallery, the Saatchi Collection and The Walker Art Gallery. Pickstone’s debut title, Park Notes, was published by Daunt Books in 2014.

* London’s first Metropolitan Park, established 1869.

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Other Stories / Sarah Pickstone

CGP London: The Gallery

Preview: Sunday 23 April / 3 – 5pm

26 April – 4 June 2017 / Wednesday to Sunday / 11am – 5pm

Free entry

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Cafe Gallery Project

CGP London is an artist led gallery of contemporary art based across two venues in Southwark Park; The Gallery and Dilston Grove. Founded in 1984 by The Bermondsey Artists’ Group, the gallery has commissioned and presented over 140 free exhibitions by emergent, overlooked and established British and international artists.

The Gallery and Dilston Grove space

CGP London manages The Gallery and Dilston Grove in Southwark Park, Bermondsey, London SE16.

Southwark Park is approximately 7 minutes walk from Canada Water station which is on the Jubilee and Overground (Highbury & Islington to Croydon) Lines. Buses travelling to Canada Water: 1, 47, 188, 199, 225, 381, 395, P12, C10.

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