London Art Fair, Platform, Stand G47

Candida Stevens is delighted to have been invited to curate Platform at the London Art Fair for the third year. For this edition the theme of Platform is 'Music and its part in Contemporary Visual Art'. We will be showing the work of three artists on our Platform stand and five artist on our main fair stand. More details will follow. 

Platform: Stand G47 we will be showing work by:

Nici Bungey

Celia Cook

Vanessa Jackson RA

Nici Bungey, b. 1967 

For artist Nici Bungey, working in response to music for London Art Fair 2022’s Platform has been a transformative experience. A regular visitor of jazz clubs in her youth, this genre of music has long been a source of enjoyment but has not previously directly informed her work.  For these new works  the music was turned up loud in Nici's studio and the energising pulse of the jazz beat flowed into the heat-pressed paint with a force that has surprised the artist. In her large-scale works #Jazz 1&2 comprising twelve individually painted pieces, you experience the sense of syncopated rhythm. Here, the audible beat is replaced by a visual pulse of connecting colours that flow and pull the eye from left to right, top to bottom, the darker borders and cores of the works acting as a springboard for the eye.

Celia Cook, b. 1964  

Ostinato 1-38 is a series of unique woodcuts inspired by musical improvisation or the jam session - a process both structured and intuitive.  An ostinato in music is a short melodic phrase, rhythm, or riff repeated in a circular pattern throughout a composition sometimes with variation and development.  This series of woodcuts reuses the same woodblock shapes in repeated but varied ways creating a series of rhythmic patterns activated by harmonious and dissonant colour, all different but improvised from the same root.  By honing in on the fundamental elements of volume, mass, and movement, Cook seeks to create dynamic relationships in continual flux, where each form engages with another as well as the canvas edge, creating what she describes as “visual gymnastics”.

Vanessa Jackson RA, b. 1953 

Vanessa Jackson, on first reading, appears to take the most formal approach to painting, but her use of geometry and its three dimensional function deny the supposed flatness of modernist space. For Jackson music and the visual arts go hand in hand, inextricably linked in their ability to transcend space and serve as abstract surfaces on which musicians and artists can make their mark. Her connection with music is not a direct relationship in which one informs the other, instead they exist in harmonious coexistence through their similarities.  The very act of painting is physical and requires interaction between painter and paint, akin to that between musician and instrument. Just like music induces dance, creating a sense of movement is key to Jackson’s paintings. This is clear in her recent work Terpsichoral. A play on the adjective terpsichorean, meaning ‘relating to dance’, large-scale trapezoids and circular segments interact through colour and space, their repeated shapes overlapping at carefully positioned angles in such a way that it appears they might begin to shift on the canvas at any moment.