13 February - 16 March 2013
Opening to the public on the 13th February Flowers
Gallery is pleased to exhibit new paintings and monotypes by
Claerwen James. James painted during her undergraduate degree in
Zoology at Oxford University, she took a Ph.D but accepted that
painting, not science, was really the focus of her creative life.
James retrained at Slade School of Fine Art, graduating from the
painting department in 2003 with a first class degree and winning
the Melvill Nettleship Prize for Figure Composition.
All of the portraits in her new works originated as photographs:
some scavenged, some taken by the artist, who believes that the
awkwardness of the photographic moment is crucial to the painful,
elegiac quality of the paintings. Her work stands at a deliberate
distance to the moments it explores.
In 2006, Francis Spufford wrote that Claerwen James' subject
matter is, in a sense, the photographic moment, when a point in
time is snatched from the flow, "sealed into stillness and set in
strange relationship to the continued life. . . which we do not see
in photographs but which they always imply, giving the medium its
mortal edge."
Born in 1970, Claerwen James has a BA Hons in Zoology from New
College Oxford, she then did postgraduate research on the molecular
biology of programmed cell
death (apoptosis) in the Biochemistry of the Cell
Nucleus Laboratory at the Imperial
Cancer Research Fund, and completed a Ph.D. in Cell Biology,
University of London. She has been represented by Flowers Gallery
since 2004, having solo shows in London in 2006, 2008 and 2010.
View exhibition