Timothy Taylor

Timothy Taylor Gallery is delighted to present In Dreams, a group exhibition featuring works on paper by established and emerging artists, including Armen Eloyan, Volker Hueller, Tomasz Kowalski, Norbert Schwontkowski, Kiki Smith and Rose Wylie.

This selection of figurative works reveals idiosyncratic narratives and their maker’s desire to construct hermetic alternative worlds. In ways similar to the logic experienced when dreaming, these drawn fictions give rise to impossible or incongruous episodes that nevertheless appear convincing when considered within their given context.

Taking inspiration from myths and literature and linking spirit, animal and human worlds, Kiki Smith’s somnambulist characters and symbolic objects appear to float freely in an ambiguous ethereal space. Smith’s large-scale collage and ink works on paper reveal a deeply personal language of coded imagery, which speaks of the fragility and transitory nature of the body.

Armen Eloyan’s latest body of watercolours depict exhausted wooden characters, whose blissful facial expressions suggest the shared ability to dream. Highly coloured and defined with bold graphic outlines these vignettes refer to their subjects unrealised and human psychosexual fantasies.

Norbert Schwontkowski’s elusive and surreal monotypes include isolated figures that occupy indeterminate grounds. Favouring a muted or monochrome palette the artist generates a faded and worn patina, which suggests half remembered instances from a distant memory.

Rose Wylie’s quirky and richly associative paintings and drawings are influenced by diverse and potentially clashing sources including Egyptian friezes, medieval wall painting, South Park cartoons, Match of the Day, and a wide array of popular films. Typically, Wylie combines poetic, humorous and surreal imagery with a powerful political message.

The hand-coloured etchings of Volker Hueller evoke the atmospheric remains of a dark European history. Spidery lines delineate ambiguous scenes: suppressed violence and sexual tension permeate within the cracks and crevices of these complex drawings.

Creating unsettling narratives using the iconographic repertoire of art history, the works of Tomasz Kowalski introduce glimpses of a parallel universe. Referring to the passage of time and the cycles of life and death, Kowalski’s surreal landscapes and interiors come crashing into our world.

The lone figures that occupy several of the compositions featured in this exhibition bear testimony to a solipsistic tendency in many studio practices. Here an emersion in medium and process leaves only enough room for a projected equivalent of the maker.