Flowers Gallery is pleased to announce the 24th edition of Artist of the Day, a vital West End exhibition programme selected by leading contemporary artists since 1983. The fast-paced, revolving two week exhibition schedule provides a platform for a selected group of artists, each presenting a one day solo exhibition at Flowers Gallery’s Mayfair location, with a programme of events taking place each day.

DAY TWO: Clare Price selected by Hannah Perry. A one day exhibition will be held from 11am - 7pm at Flowers Gallery, Cork Street, London.

To coincide with the exhibition anIn Conversation event, with Clare Price and Andrew Renton will take place from 12-2pm. Please contact rsvp@flowersgallery.com to confirm your attendance.

The ultimate intention for the work is to probe the idea that “Art comes through the body”  whilst seeking to maintain a conversation with the history of painting.  

The work explores ideas around the voluptuous materiality of paint.  In the paintings visceral oil paint is set against more defined lines to create a rupture.  Stains and poured goo onto raw canvas refer both to the body and to Abstract Expressionism, Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler in particular. Geometric shapes interplay with gestural elements creating ambiguous spaces.  Stained, spilled vistas are interrupted by shapes drawn from flawed facets of video games and modernist forms in honour of Reinhardt, Palermo and Malevich.

The paintings investigate the sensuousness of making, the palpable “stuff” of paint that freezes the hidden performance, the interaction with the body and materials in the studio, traces and residues of moments are captured like photographic exposures. The edges of the stretcher contain and tether sensations, this containment heightening the forces within; creating deep spaces, harnessing the chaos of the studio to create small universes within the frame. Titles are encrypted autobiographical references that allude to the body, containment and the moments in which the works were made.  There is bodily quality to the works they are vulnerable, exposed, rent open after all De Kooning said: “Flesh is the reason Oil paint was invented”.

In recent explorations I have begun to take photographs of myself situating my body within the practice in relation to the paintings. Through these works I have been playing with my identity or ‘performing the self’, trying to take back power within patriarchal structures by owning it, teasing it; camping it up and at times, using humour as a form of resistance.  The photographs are a way of un-containing the sensuality, sexuality and experience of what the paintings hold within them and explore the release of this self from the “bloc of sensation”, as Deleuze would call it, of the painting’s frame. Self-publishing these images via Instagram touches upon ideas of cyber-feminism and of course the female gaze. 

An obsession with paint and painting and matter drives the work, dealing with "stuff" that exists in both the stars and the earth and our bodies.

- Clare Price

[1] Research has to go through a body; it has to be lived in some sense—transformed into some sort of lived experience—in order to become whatever we might call art.[1] Mark Leckey interview by Mark Fischer, Kaleidescope Magazine, Kaleidescope-press.com

Clare's paintings are intimate and bold. Her works to me have a definitive connection to the language of the female body. Not necessarily in it’s pallet or tone, but with the actions and gestures, signalling femininity at its rawest. The expression is both strong and fragile, honest and open.

How can the act of painting be infused with the act of performance is a conversation we have had a lot recently. I like the movement in her work as much as the containment, composure and disposition.

- Hannah Perry