Workplace is pleased to announce b chehayeb's first European solo exhibition 

which features new paintings by the New York based artist.

A detail of a blue abstract gestural painting by b chehayeb

London

tomboy heaven

Workplace is pleased to announce the first UK solo exhibition by Pei Wang.

The ‘extreme close-up’ is a technique which cinema has long employed to reveal more than the human eye might normally see – a device to build empathy between the viewer and the protagonist in the service of a constructed narrative. In the work of Pei Wang, tightly cropped faces are rendered on canvas with meticulous and unwavering detail. 

Light glistens on the moist surface of an eye, translucent layers of saturated colour forms skin as minute crevices and folds undulating in and out of focus. Brooding dramatic tension is heightened by the murky chiaroscuro of a darkened background.

In his seminal 1936 essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ Walter Benjamin argues that the ‘aura’ - the presence and authenticity of a work of art - is rooted in its singularity and uniqueness within a specific context, whereas mechanically reproduced artforms such as photography and film shift away from the singular aura of the art object towards a democratisation and politicisation. In our age of digital dissemination, Pei Wang’s canvases are a battleground, a site of both homage and challenge, where the aura is not lost but transformed.

Depictions of the face and body align with our innate human reflex and desires that are exploited by digital platforms to feed our perpetual engagement. Wang’s use of casein tempera—an ancient form of paint derived from milk and laden with historical and biological connotations—stands as defiant affirmation of the tactile and the temporal. Surface texture, the play of light and shadow, the subtle gradations of colour—all are given prominence, demanding from the viewer a meditative attention that opposes the scrolling speeds of digital consumption.

The algorithm—a god of our own unwitting creation—demands of images a certain legibility and speed of consumption. Wang’s work resists this with a stoic ferocity. Here, the close-up does not merely serve the algorithm's insatiable hunger for clarity and immediacy. Instead, it becomes a tool of resistance, a method of slowing the eye, of demanding contemplation and, ultimately, of commanding a more profound engagement. This is painting as an act of defiance, a slow rebellion against the tyranny of the instantaneous.

A painting by Pei Wang of a child in white with a short blonde bob sitting on a white horse

The Enneagram Mask

, a new solo exhibition by Swedish artist Jacob Dahlgren. Opening on Thursday 29 August, the exhibition will feature new and reimagined sculpture and installation by Dahlgren.

In our ground floor gallery, Dahlgren will present a new version of his seminal installation 

. Colourful tin cans are stacked end to end and snake impossibly throughout the gallery space. The legacy of Minimalism’s intrinsic relationship between the object, space, and the body is expanded by Dahlgren. The contents of the tin-cans having been consumed by the artist, and their metallic graphic wrapped cylindrical husks remaining as both record and measure. These familiar items are removed of their original function and recontextualised as a colourful abstract linear geometric form, creating a dialogue between pure formal abstraction and a shared social culture. 

 speaks both to high modernism and minimalism as well as to pertinent contemporary issues of food production, consumption, cost of living and the economies of a personal and global nature.

A series of new wall-based sculptural works, considered as paintings by Dahlgren, are on view in the lower ground floor. Formed from mass-produced coat hangers, composed in a horizontal striped pattern, these works continue Dahlgren’s longstanding investigation into geometric and abstract motifs in the everyday environment. Stripped of their original function, the coat hangers transcend their utilitarian origins to become vibrant and dynamic works.

A grouping of maquettes by Dahlgren are positioned on plinths in our viewing room, highlighting the artist’s extensive public art practice which have been commissioned internationally in sculpture parks, public plazas and civic environments.  These maquettes – both realised and unrealised as major works - are sculptures in their own right, representing Dahlgren’s ability to playfully reimagine his additive process as giant rhizomatic forms and environments of monumental scale.

This exhibition highlights Dahlgren’s ability to recontextualise everyday objects, transforming them into works that challenge viewers’ perceptions, revealing beauty in the ordinary. Through grounding the materiality of his works in the quotidian and ubiquitous, Dahlgren upends the rarified exclusivity of ‘Modern Art’ - rediscovering it in everyday scenarios, and infusing the abstract with the political.

A sculpture by Jacob Dahlgren of various types of food cans connected end to end to create an endless loop

An installation view of Jacob Dahlgren's wall based sculptures made from coloured coat hangers 

When Anxieties Become Form

Workplace is pleased to launch the latest instalment of 

, a series of presentations in which the practice of artists at early stages of their career and new to the gallery programme are introduced through a body of work, curated specifically for each presentation.

For this instalment we introduce the work of Pei Wang (b.1989, China), a Barcelona based artist who recieved his BA in Sculpture from China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, in 2012 and his MA in Oil painting from China Academy of Art, in 2015. The artist received his PhD in Medieval studies RA from University of Barcelona, Barcelona, in 2021.

a cropped image of a painting by Pei Wang that depicts a stomach with naval and a scar

Focus

, an exhibition of new work by James Cabaniuk, Jennifer Carvalho, Robin Megannity, Teresa Murta, Norberto Spina, Pei Wang, Alistair Woods, and Tianyue Zhong.

This exhibition explores realms of temporal dissonance, investigating unconventional attitudes to time through various lenses such as queer temporality, the historical return, the contemporary surreal and the fragmentation of memory and narrative. 

 shares its title with a painting by Robin Megannity. A fragment in time is left hovering and untethered, creating a feeling of tension, peculiarity and disorientation.

 depicts a large and ornate gate. Tightly cropped, the painting is built up of layers of small intentional marks, the closed gate - a threshold to the anxieties of life and beyond, through the Pearly Gates toward heaven or the heavy rusting wrought-iron Gates of Hell.

 large and thickly painted abstract paintings delve into charged memories of encounters. Painted with speed, and in a performative mode, they explore ideas of a queer temporality and how experience, histories and identities can shift and dissolve outside of a conventional linear developmental progression. The abstraction and constant state of change leans into the opacity of queerness, traversing bodily and emotional autonomy.

 mines work from Antiquity to the Renaissance to connect historical narratives to the present. Framing the anthropocene as a shift from earlier modes of telling and inhabiting history, her paintings work to trouble an anthropocentrically linear time, defined by humanity’s tendency to erase, rewrite and misremember entire histories.

 classically layered oil paintings emerge from shadowy dialogues between the tactile and the virtual. Scenes exist outside of time in a hallucinatory reality populated by provisional sculptures, found objects and props that merge the prosaic with the hypothetical. In these domains the border between physical and digital spaces becomes porous and elusive, a super-reality wherein the rationality of our advancing technological progress is ruptured by dystopian hallucinations and fragments of the dark and delirious.

 journeys into the realms of the fantastical, bringing together abstracted elements of form with gesture to imply movement and metamorphosis. Intuitively, the artist fuses together elements from both the artificial and natural worlds, offering viewers a gateway into alternate, sometimes absurd, realities. Murta’s dynamic use of colour and shape creates a sense of continual movement and implies the constant flux of time.

 depicts an extreme close-up of a face. Deeply saturated with colour the eyeball looks left, wide-eyed and reddened. Filled with palpable tension, Wang uses surrealist strategies, referencing Buñuel and Dali’s Un Chien Andalou and through his use of casein tempera - a paint derived from milk, he hints back to an essential strangeness at the core of our experience. Wang’s eyeball is held in stasis at maximum openness, perpetually at a moment about to blink.

 explores social and human existence through subcultures. Drawing imagery from everyday life, including aspects of religious iconography, popular figures and mundane objects, he combines both low and high cultural reference points, giving them equal importance and cultural value. Finding equivalence with the historical and the contemporary, Woods elevates the quotidian to establish a new position and system of value.

 paintings, human presence has been obliterated and reworked with linear marks. Beginning her paintings with an image taken at a place and time different from where she is at the time of making, her muted gestural abstractions connect back to a sense of intimacy, introspection and place. Through her work Zhong is interested in reconnecting with past experiences of feeling restrained within a structure, locked within a frozen moment remembering how to begin to escape.

A detail of a painting by Jennifer Carvalho of two hands grasping onto long tangled lengths of hair against the backdrop of a rocky landscape with two small structures

Documentation of 'and still i may' 12 July - 24th August, at Workplace | London

and still I may

Workplace is pleased to announce an upcoming solo exhibition with contemporary British painter Laura Lancaster.


Opening in May 2024 to coincide with a major exhibition of her work at Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland, the presentation of 

at Workplace will build upon and reflect Lancaster’s idiosyncratic exploration of collective memory, loss and longing. Embodying a poignant sense of transience and reflection, her paintings navigate an ambiguous territory between abstraction and figuration, shifting between the sentimental and melancholic, the uncanny and strange. 

Lancaster’s recent body of work depicts anonymous women set within pastoral landscapes, as part of her ongoing engagement with archival and discarded ephemera she sources from online auction sites, flea markets and junk shops. While rooted in a longer lineage of artists pushing the psychological boundaries of figurative painting, she is interested in subverting the gendered nature of this art history. Divorced from their specific context and time, Lancaster’s subject matter appears like a dreamlike vision taken from a shared consciousness, where figures reveal themselves to the viewer, both haunting and alluring, creating a sense of connection between the lives of the lost and the nameless - and our own. 


In this new body of work, Lancaster delves further into the physicality of her materials, refocusing and transforming how paint and image interact with one another. The works explore the interplay of liminal space, and the physical aspect of the paint becoming an entry way for illusion. The result of which is work that is transcient, with figures that ebb and flow as if through a distant memory or a fleeting dream. 

a cropped painting by Laura Lancaster of 4 children sitting in the grass in the woods

Installation shots of Laura Lancasters solo exhibition 'In Dreams' at Workplace | London

In Dreams

Opening reception: Thursday 11 April, 6 - 8pm

Workplace is delighted to announce Ground, a solo exhibition of new paintings by James Collins.


Made deliberately and slowly, often over several years, James Collins employs additive means to excavate shapes and forms that emerge from within and beneath, as if always there. In his meticulous, densely layered paintings, gradual accretions of oil are built into mounds, furrows, and channels, becoming topographical sites of intense colour.


Deep, pearlescent beetle-black blues withhold and reflect light, whilst seemingly earthen browns - on closer inspection - emit spectral patchworks of luminescence. For Collins, paint is alchemical. In the laboratory of his Darlington studio in Northern England, pigment and medium are mixed and melded to create impossibly chromatic hues that shift constantly with the changing light, and as one moves around them.


Challenging the idea of painting as pictorial space, Collins insists on the paradoxical nature of painting both as surface and as event. As objects, his paintings resist narrative and interpretation, remaining absolute in their immediacy, confronting the viewer with the fact of their materiality. Simultaneously, his paintings require the viewer to succumb to spatial and temporal dislocation - to be transported by, and with, each painting – as if through the unknowable reaches of deep time: through epochs, civilisations, and evolution. Through singular, glacial intent, Collins reveals foundational, archetypal forms, primordial signifiers of the great arc of existence.

An installation image of James Collins solo exhibition in a white walled gallery space including 6 thick impasto paintings in dark wooden frames

Installation photographs of James Collins exhibition 'Ground' at Workplace | London

Ground

Workplace is delighted to announce Amber, a new exhibition of sculptures by artist Hazel Brill, which runs from 12 April - 25 May.

Rooted in her research around prometheus narratives in gothic fiction and sci-fi, her latest body of work combines an assortment of mechanical and organic materials taking inspiration from how biomimicry and biotechnology in architecture blurs the lines between living and non-living. The title references Brill’s interest in the dual seduction and fear around  transformative technologies, as amber lights can be both a warning and a calming, protective presence. Amber has further significance as the resin holds the non-living in stasis, not allowing organisms to decompose, leading to mythologies around it holding the essence of life. Brill uses microscopic images of ancient plant fragments and fossilised insects found inside amber in the designs of her sculptures as well as incorporating pine resin and amber in the materials.

Congregating in the centre of the gallery, alluding to a surreal laboratory gone awry, the works are created from internal mechanisms, such as simple rotating devices, lightbulbs and speakers, as well as strange prophetic dioramas. Modest in size yet intricate in their construction, they embody a sense of motion and agency, like tiny hybrid creatures that have emerged from other worlds.

Her most recent body of work sits between the grotesque and seductive, creepy and tender – expanding upon theuncanny presence of puppet theatre, clockwork animatronics and other forms of beings that navigate the line between living and dead. Bacteria features in the ‘belly’ of one of the sculptures, further alluding to histories of technology imbuing inanimate objects with life – a pygmalian and Frankenstein-like narrative which increasingly underpins storytelling around science and touches on the role of emotion in scientific research.

The sculptures embody an ominous presence and ambiguous sense of agency, acting both as protagonists and portals.Abstract narratives are weaved across the surface and material, appearing on metal, clay, glass, pine-resin, resin 3-d prints, as well as an imprinted on the wall-based works.

An installation view of Hazel Brill's exhibition featuring 5 glowing resin coloured sculptures on steel plinths

Installation photographs of Hazel Brill's exhibition 'Amber' at Workplace London

Amber

Workplace is pleased to announce a new solo exhibition by London-based artist Max Boyla.

Across Workplace’s two floors, Boyla stages a new series of paintings and installations which explore the spiritual and cultural resonances of the sun. Set to open on 29 February, a leap day, the title of the exhibition evokes the sun as a beacon of hope and a source of anxiety, just as many religious traditions rely upon heat and light as powerful metaphors, a symbolism which becomes all the more pertinent as contemporary environmental consciousness addresses the climate crisis. 

On the ground floor, Workplace’s prominent street-facing window fills the space with light, yet absent of other sources, thebrightness is dependent on the time of day and weather. As visitors walk through the space, a single light bulb is attached to the entrance doorway, making visitors more aware of their own presence alongside the works, and creates a sensory relationshipbetween the objects and how they are encountered. Celestial and ghost-like, these images call back to Boyla’s long-standinginterest in spiritual notions of existence and mythological entities, yet no tangible figures are depicted. Instead, the abstractpaintings embrace elemental qualities, such as one featuring the bluish-black of the moon and another with prominent white spots against a reddish background, mimicking the afterimage of looking at a bright light, an optical reference which expandsupon the artist’s interest in the relationship between looking and knowing, what can be seen and what evades our senses. 

Similar motifs repeat and shift across the levels, creating a sense of transition as if one was a dark inversion of the other, akin to the rotation of the sun and moon. As visitors make their way downstairs, dim lighting in the basement contrasts the daylight above, while a hanging neon sculpture of a star hangs over the staircase marking the transition between both. The series of paintings continue into the basement and are scored with a cyclical soundtrack appropriated from Danny Boyle’s 2007 sci-fi film Sunshine, where scientists attempt to reignite the sun as it dies. Here, Boyla is playing with notions of perception alongside a carefully considered atmosphere.  

The ways in which the paintings function like an installation within the gallery echoes the process behind their construction. In many of the works, Boyla forgoes a traditional use of brushes on a flat stretched surface, instead folding, wrapping and rolling the material, which is then seeped and stained with different combinations of pigment, water, ink and noxious industrial liquids such as bleach, creating a kind of alchemy that emerges out of a physical, almost sculptural process. Painted on satin, a fabric that is notably
glossy, smooth and lustrous, the shiny surface absorbs paint and reflects light, becoming sensitive to the conditions in which they are encountered, a physical quality to the surface that manifests like an illusion.

Driven by an interest in music and film, the artist’s approach to painting follows a subtle thread of analogue influences. Boyla has referenced the glossy surface of the satin he paints on, like a blank CD or DVD, with his painting process riffing on the idea of ‘burning’ a duplicate on a disc. The artist is interested in the ways repetition and multiplicity are connected with analogue material culture, yet also allude to spiritual notions of infinity and the cosmos.

Detail of an abstract Max Boyla painting on silk with large white spots against a red and pink ground

Installation images of Max Boyla's exhibition 'Crying like a fire in the sun' at Workplace, London. 

 Crying like a fire in the sun

, a group exhibition of work by three artists: James Cabaniuk, b chehayeb and Rafael Pérez Evans, who each explore their relationship to place, time, memory, intersectionality, trauma, and escape through processes of introspection and investigation. 

In Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s story 

, the protagonist Max is banished to his bedroom by his parent where, in his confinement, he enters the temporal and spatially dissonant world of his imagination, voyaging ‘in and out of weeks’ to reach a fantastical island of cannibalistic monsters that threaten to devour him. Upon conquering them, he commands them to engage in a tumultuous ‘wild rumpus’ before he returns home for his dinner. Steeped in psychoanalytic theory Sendak’s story is an allegory of the human capacity to confront and navigate trauma and intense emotional responses to the world, and how they may be processed and overcome through world-building, psychological fantasy, and imaginative journeying. The artists in the exhibition each purposefully traverse problematic complexities of the external world and their relationship to it, responding through delving into atemporal, fantastical or visionary worlds.

James Cabaniuk employs abstraction and strategies of queer opacity to construct thickly layered large scale abstract oil paintings. Seeking to liberate personal trauma from shame, and exploring queer identity and history, the authoritative singularity and machismo of 20th Century Abstract Expressionist painting becomes a world wherein Cabaniuk navigates their own complex relationship to the power it embodies - simultaneously fetishising and critiquing it. Materiality and performativity are held in tension by Cabaniuk and materials such as confetti, glitter, and soil serve as tools of celebration, resilience, and connection. Through gestural spontaneity the paintings become energetic sites that embody concepts of fun, camp, sexuality, gender, self-destruction, healing, and community to challenge and embrace boundaries. 

b chehayeb‘s paintings transcribe memories and sensory experiences into gesture, colour and texture. Using oil paint and oil stick on board and canvas, chehayeb records stories, as they exist in her memory, into largely abstracted visual language, punctuated by more direct iconography, where each painting represents a moment, or a feeling from the artist’s life. Employing the perspective of her own history and bi-cultural background – having grown up Mexican American in suburban Texas, she is focused on the reconstruction of failed memories, specifically memories warped by nostalgia, gender and cultural hybridity. chehayeb incorporates stories, cultural references, and traumas into her work, always alternating between representation and abstraction. 

Witnessing the demonstrations of Spanish farmers as a child, Rafael Pérez Evans saw vast quantities of lemons dumped in protest against a market devaluation in the 1990’s that made them more expensive to pick than sell. Drawing upon legacies of 1960s sculpture, Land Art and acts of social protest, the artist looks at agriculture and the post-industrial city as a ‘deranged metabolic system’ and considers how historical processes of illusion continue to be present in consumer culture, where infinitely recurring sequences of class struggle, aspiration and power continue to haunt the present. In the sculptural works exhibited at Workplace, optical illusions are created by propping mirrors open with live root vegetables such as yams. Pérez Evans creates fantastical visions of produce, magically suspended in mid-air, floating as strange, bodily, wheel-like forms. Packing material, transportation trolleys and other shipping debris are left conspicuous in the work, giving visibility to the evidence of human labour present in chains of production, usually cleverly hidden.

crop of b chehayeb's painting 'jncos at the quinceanera' a large red abstract painting 

installation images of 'and in and out of weeks' at Workplace | London by Tom Carter

and in and out of weeks

Workplace is pleased to announce a new solo exhibition by Rachel Lancaster. Continuing her longstanding interest in the intersections of cinema and painting, the artist’s new body of work explores a quiet tension between familiarity and mystery, capturing the uncanny backlit glow of pre-digital media. 

Based on films from the 1980s and 90s, the new series of paintings further draws out the ‘noise’ and visual distortion of analogue footage. Rooted in the artist’s own formative experiences with VHS tapes and other physical media, the resulting works reflect the particular light and colour of a past time, evoking a culturally specific aesthetic sensibility through a painterly quality that is equally haunting, curious and dream-like.

Working with photographic stills from films, alongside her own archive of images, Lancaster uses oil paint to heighten the psychological intensity of the scenes and weave an ambiguous narrative through seemingly insignificant subjects: passing shots, commonplace interiors and close ups of inanimate objects. For instance, in 

 (2023) a faintly rendered makeup, a hair brush and mirror sit atop a table, yet the ghostly lighting disturbs the ordinariness of the scene. 

 (2023) are set within quiet domestic moments, but the pronounced point of view creates an unsettling tension.

Lancaster’s world is constructed through fleeting moments and fragments of memory, always existing on the edge of comprehension. Is that the shadow of a bird in flight? Is a detail of clothing or strand of hair from someone passing by?

 (2023), the closeness to the subject straddles a line between comfort and claustrophobia, as a tight cropped view of a man’s chest shows ample detail of fabric and shirt buttons but crops out his face or other identifying features. Others have little action in the centre, instead placing emphasis on the furthest edge of the canvas, as if the point of view was a panning shot around a room. Textures of paper, silk and fabric define the ambiguous paintings, such as 

 (2023), while elsewhere a dream-like aesthetic of gentle fades and hazy vision appears to be on the verge of sleep.

The paintings are made by applying successive thin glazes of translucent oil paint, allowing many layers of colour and texture to accrue over time. Slipping between definition and abstraction, her surfaces contain an array of optical effects. Often, anticipated details give way to looser, minimal rendering that is revealed as a painterly abstraction upon closer inspection. The artist carefully considers subtle decisions about cropping the source material, and through an open ended, intuitive process, evokes a narrative that is full of mystery and intrigue. A careful attention to multiple scales – life size, close up, zoom, at a distance – establish distinct modes of viewing, placing the viewer in different vantage points, either on the floor, at eye level, looking down upon the subject. The eerie scenes are as if they are within their own temporality, either stuck in the past or in a limbo state. Reflections, colours and action point beyond the canvas, suggestive of what else is happening outside the image, lurking out of sight.

detail crop of Rachel Lancaster's painting 'Lost In Another's Dream' a painting of a duvet shot at night in blue tones

Rachel Lancaster's medium scale oil paintings of domestic objects from cinema are hung in a spacious white gallery space

Newcastle

In The Wake

, an exhibition of new paintings by Julia Maiuri, which runs from 17 November – 6 January 2024 at Workplace London.

Weaving together scenes of vampires, imposters and the stars of yesteryear, Maiuri's exhibition shifts between cinematic notions of time and a painterly language of memory. In this new series of paintings, the artist continues her longstanding interest in the history of cinema, stitching disparate films to create works that are at once foreboding, ethereal and lyrical.

Distinct from the sharpness of a cut or the sense of closure of a fade-to-black, a ‘dissolve’ within cinema is a particular technique to mark a transition between scenes. Just as this technique is often utilised by directors to play with time and draw emotional, psychological and conceptual connections between distinct moments, Maiuri has invented her own unique dissolves based upon different films for this new body of work. 

Maiuri is interested in how freezing moments of transition creates a feeling of tension and suspense, complicating progression and the permanence of place. She has collected wide-ranging images from the history of cinema to explore visual motifs, character tropes and narrative themes, often collapsing disparate periods and genres. The exhibition title, 

, evokes paradoxes between the past and present, while underscoring psychologically-tense appreciation of time – either within cinema or painting.

Whether it is the dark seduction of a vampire or the personal crisis of a former-star, a number of classic works of cinema confront notions of transformation and change. These paintings are largely based on a number of films which cross history and genre but have a shared set of concerns. By drawing connections and parallels to films and characters through time periods, a new sense of foreshadowing can be felt across the works, while also suggesting that the attitudes and expectations of audiences have, and will continue, to change.

The works display a notable shift in the artist’s process. Making use of both gallery floors, the exhibition will present a series of small and medium-sized paintings on the ground floor, with brightly-coloured raw canvas pieces on the lower ground. While Maiuri has been working with cinematic visual devices for many years, for these works she began with a saturated underpainting, which creeps through in parts of each canvas where the final painting is desaturated and monochromatic. Each series of works mirror the composition of each other, reflecting back subtle conventions of form and visual culture.

a purple hued painting of an eye overlaying a face by Julia Maiuri

installation views of Julia Maiuri's exhibition at Workplace in London

Yesterday & The End

Workplace and Gathering are delighted to present 

, an ambitious solo exhibition of large-scale sculpture, installation, and wall-based work by Simeon Barclay, collaboratively shown across both galleries.

Each gallery will feature paintings from the same wall-based acrylic series, drawing an explicit continuity between the overlapping exhibitions. Set against a striking black background, cropped and edited film stills from Hedi Slimane's Celine Autumn/ Winter 23 fashion campaign depict models projecting an effortless nonchalance behind sunglasses, a sight that both absorbed and repelled the artist due to their layer of impenetrability. To further explore this tension, Barclay has intervened into the surface with vinyl and painted canvas, creating colourful abstract blocks akin to the work of Matisse as a gesture towards deconstruction, fandom and appropriation.

At Workplace, a metal railing skirts around the darkened basement, where a series of neon text works held within semi-transparent bins illuminate the space. Visitors, kept at a slight remove by the barrier, can wander through the haunting atmosphere of the environment. A film installation projects handheld footage into the gallery to fill the space with emergency strobe lights, evoking an elusive sense of danger at night, whilst upstairs a fabricated weightlifting rack is adorned with strange and familiar sculptural elements, invoking the notion of strength as a defence mechanism. Here, Barclay’s references to public architecture, institutions of control and tools for individual optimisation gestures towards the privatisation of urban space, where access to public areas is contingent upon private forces and reduces the agency of passers-by, often made indirectly visible due to the presence of sentinels and physical barriers. The silence of the film along with the ambiguity of the weightlifting rack further underscores this sense of what is stated and unstated, what is seen and unseen.

close up image of a model at a Celine fashion show, the model has dreadlocks and is wearing dark glasses

Installation views of Simeon Barclay's exhibition 'At Home, Everywhere and Nowhere'

At Home, Everywhere and Nowhere

Workplace is delighted to announce A Savage Garden, a new exhibition in Newcastle by Sarah Schlesinger, which runs from 23 September - 4 November 2023.

Rooted in the psychology of looking, Schlesinger paints monochromatic landscapes which are often obstructed by hedges, bushes and other objects, prompting the viewer to consider concealed meanings or underlying narratives beyond that which is presented.

The exhibition includes nine new small scale works, and continues the artist's exploration into the act of looking as metaphor for understanding. The title, drawn from the novel The Vampire LeStat (1985) by Anne Rice, a follow up to her critically acclaimed debut, Interview with the Vampire (1976), refers to an influential quote and serves as a description of the paintings presented: ‘It was as dangerous and lawless as the earth had been eons before man had one single coherent thought in his head or wrote codes of conduct on tablets of clay. Beauty was a Savage Garden.”

Subtle details explore and expand Schlesinger’s characteristic motif through the series, and her rigorous muted tones capture the velvety darkness of a night sky, the intricacy of clouds and billowing smoke, the tranquil beauty of wide open spaces. A moody atmosphere permeates the scenes, as the juxtaposition of light and shadow evoke tensions between paradoxical beauty and impending doom. In others, hedgerow weaves under the tranquil night sky, winding across the surface of the canvas to create a sense of movement and rhythm. At times, a hint of danger is present through misty haze, a perplexing smoke without fire. While the presence of lost objects, tools and weapons, hint at a concealed conflict.

a painting in dark green of a snake in the grass by Sarah Schlesinger

installation views of Sarah Schlesinger's exhibition at Workplace | Newcastle

A Savage Garden

Workplace is pleased to present Summer Remains, a solo exhibition of new paintings by London based artist Sooim Jeong. The artist’s first exhibition at Workplace since joining the gallery earlier this year, continues Jeong’s exploration of perceived reality and personal memory.

The artist’s practice draws upon a wide spectrum of experiences, from the profound weight of tragic loss to mundane and seemingly trivial interactions with strangers. With a restrained and sensitive colour palette and minimal calligraphic brushstrokes, she constructs playful compositions. Jeong’s approach is informed learning traditional calligraphy as a teenager in Korea. Bringing together disparate fragments of scattered past and more recent memories, Jeong recomposes these into images within the confined space of the canvas.

Created during the summer months, Jeong’s latest work embodies a deep reflection on past memories or, as she refers to them, ‘remains’ which have surfaced in her mind during this period. Jeong describes these as ‘the things left in my head, after the rest has evaporated away’. Her paintings are infused with raw and profound emotions, encapsulating the experience of confronting these memories. Throughout this introspective process, Jeong highlights the enduring imprints of the summer within her work.

Jeong repeatedly incorporates familiar imagery into her paintings such as shirts, mittens, and vases, each holding a distinct and singular meaning. Objects that make insignificant appearances in her memory, become the focus - and the only clear detail she can recall. Returning to her stylistic motifs - depictions of verdant foliage, orange fruit, and forms of smoke, drizzle, and haze - she delicately infuses her canvas with a whimsical, cartoon-like charm, influenced by her physical surroundings and experience of living close to Greenwich Park in Southeast London.

The work in the exhibition can be thought as a visual diary or record, as Jeong juggles both symbolic and metaphorical images, positioning the large and small events of her life side by side to be acknowledged with equal perspective and without distinction. As Jeong explains, this process provides her relief from angst, and simultaneously, a greater sense of trepidation at the nihilistic loss of meaning that this might imply.

a crop of a painting 'Monsoon Vase' by Sooim Jeong which depicts a bright blue floral vase with hands above and below it

Sooim Jeong's paintings for her exhibition 'Summer Remains' presented in the minimal white walled and grey floored basement space of Workplace, 50 Mortimer Street

Summer Remains

Workplace is pleased to present The Future Leaks Out, a two person exhibition featuring new and recent work by London based artist Victor Lim Seaward and Philadelphia based artist Meredith Sellers. The exhibition’s title is drawn from William S. Burroughs’ aphoristic quote about his developments of the Dadaist Cut-up technique: ‘When you cut into the present the future leaks out’. The works in the exhibition utilise isolation, mediation and combinations of images and objects to offer a metaphorical incision into the present moment and evince underlying anxieties of the future.

The Future Leaks Out brings together Seller’s critical examination of image-making in a post-digital age and Seaward’s ongoing exploration of the possibilities associated with ceaseless technological advancement. Their works collectively draw attention to ever- evolving contemporary social and cultural discourses. They presciently hint at the profound anxiety stemming from the continuously expanding realm of technology and, echoing Burroughs prophetic declaration, its potential to destabilise and topple closely guarded historical and cultural foundations.

Victor Lim Seaward delves into a rich legacy of object history. The works in this exhibition emphasise his series of ‘objets d’art’, wherein Seaward combines high-tech industrial processes, historically significant imagery, and precious metals to re-examine art historical tropes. By meticulously arranging artefacts and museological objects, reconfigured in varying relationship and scale to each other, Seaward’s works overturn entranched colonial heirarchies to explore themes of commodity, production, and agency, generating a charged connection between the past and present that points towards an uncertain future.

Meredith Sellers’ paintings fuse the traditional concept of paintings as pictorial windows with the boundless possibilities of the digital screen. By appropriating images from a diverse range of sources - including digital advertisements, stock photography, art history and news outlets - Sellers confronts the underlying systems of power, wealth, and violence that shape our contemporary experience. Through the juxtaposition of halting and visceral portrayals of destruction, such as car crashes, alongside subtler indicators of catastrophe like dripping taps and melting ice-shelves, Sellers’ works present a compelling meditation on the prevailing macroeconomic, ecological and political forces that shape us.

a detail of a painting of two cars after a head on collision by Meredith Sellers

installation shots of 'The Future Leaks Out' at Workplace | London

The Future Leaks Out

Workplace is pleased to present The Blue Hour, an exhibition of work by ten female artists: Aglaé Bassens, Hazel Brill, Cathleen Clarke, Olivia Jia, Laura Lancaster, Rachel Lancaster, Julia Maiuri, Prae Pupityastaporn, Sarah Schlesinger and Jill Tate.

The blue hour (l’heure bleue) is a period of twilight when the sun is at a specific position beneath the horizon and the sunlight’s blue wavelengths dominate the sky. It holds a unique ambiance and energy, often evoking a range of emotions and psychological states – solitude, introspection, vulnerability, tension, mystery or fear. It brings a heightened sensitivity to the nuances of one’s thoughts and emotions, and a blurring of the boundaries between the realms of the conscious and the subconscious.

Within the exhibition, the artists explore the contemplative space that the blue hour offers and present a unique female perspective of solitude and intimacy either from an enclosed domestic interior or from isolated immersion in the outside world.

Olivia Jia’s new painting Page unfolded (Audubon great tern), expands upon the intricate nuances of environments encountered at night. Painted using what Jia describes as a ‘nocturnal’ palette, the painting is encountered by the viewer as if trapped between a state of sleep and awake.

Strands of Sleep by Cathleen Clarke forms part of her new ongoing series of Sleepover paintings. Rendered in soft dreamlike tones, the painting depicts figures asleep amongst dark green foliage. Lit from the milky glow of the moonlight, the figures dissolve into darkness, inviting viewers to delve into the mysterious landscape of the subconscious realm.

Aglaé Bassens presents a poignant depiction of everyday life in her painting Night Laundry. Here, Bassens portrays a mundane laundry line, silhouetted against the soft glow from a domestic window. The object takes on a new significance, becoming a poetic symbol of personal histories and the quiet labour of everyday life.

Prae Pupityastaporn draws from the overlooked minutiae of daily life. By intertwining streams of the subconscious, Pupityastaporn offers dreamlike insight into the flux and fragility of memory, both personal and shared. Her paintings demonstrate the shifting possibilities of shared emotional fabrics, proving how each of our complex internal states can colour perceptions of the external world.

Jill Tate delves into the concept of home and shared personal space. Tate constructs scale models and makes paintings of these sparse scenes in warm hues of terracotta. Through this process and use of light and colour, Tate explores the psychological constructs of home, whether it be a place of sanctuary or of confinement.

Hazel Brill has taken a recognisable domestic item, the cuckoo clock, and rendered it dysfunctional. Made out of red glass and metal, the clock references the interiors of gothic horror fiction. Darkly surreal, this object pertains to the functioning of the mind, suggesting a descent into the irrational and subversive.

Sarah Schlesinger depicts obstructed landscapes of hedges and bushes, set against darkening and brooding skies in a monochromatic palette,. Initially reminiscent of idyllic English country gardens, Schlesinger’s work transcends representation creating mystique and palpable tension, prompting viewers to unravel the veiled meanings or narratives beyond that which is presented.

Taken from photographs of moving images, Rachel Lancaster’s two new paintings evoke a sense of dramatic anticipation. Both figures are surrounded by darkness, closing them off form the viewer and making the canvas their own solitary space. The figures simultaneously appear and dissolve, and Lancaster achieves both stillness and suspense through what she describes as ‘loud silence’.

Julia Maiuri references the cinematic, paying homage to film noir and horror movies. Letter and Sorry I missed you, are two new works by Maiuri, each using stills from the 1945 film My Name is Julia Ross. By capturing moments of dissolution, Maiuri infuses her subjects with a sense of thwarted pursuit and ambiguity, creating a distinct and transitory dreamlike atmosphere.

The work of Laura Lancaster explores the boundaries of representation and memory. These new works feature solitary figures, suspended in a state of flux, and painted in ethereal light of the blue hour. Featuring an anonymous figure, the paintings evoke a sense of quiet introspection, vulnerability and an invitation to explore the depths of one’s own memories.

a close up crop of Cathleen Clarke Strands of Sleep , 2023 Oil and acrylic on canvas 61 x 76.2 cm 24 x 30 in. A sleeping figure is surrounded by other figures sleeping. 

installation shots of The Blue Hour at Workplace | London

The Blue Hour

Workplace is pleased to present Still Moving, an exhibition of new works by North-East based artists Phyllis Christopher, Kuba Ryniewicz and Jade Sweeting. 

The exhibition delves into the intricate themes of relationships, portraiture, and the body whilst exploring the diversity and intrigue of subcultures.  

Phyllis Christopher focuses on the human body as a site of empowerment. The work included in this exhibition is a portrait of the body prior to a medical mastectomy. Requested by the sitter as a way of acknowledging the significance of her breast and as a way of saying goodbye, Elizabeth is Christopher’s first work in her new series ‘The Queer Body in Peril’ where she returns to using traditional photography to investigate bodies in transition. Christopher invites viewers to contemplate the complexities of identity, transformation, and the human experience through intimate images of the human body.  

Kuba Ryniewicz’s work defies conventional notions of portraiture. His photographs seek both to capture the essence of the individual and to serve as windows into their untold stories, providing a space which gives permission for the sitter to reveal their uninhibited identity, often through interaction with surrounding objects or landscape. Ryniewicz’s distinctive approach challenges the boundaries of traditional portraiture, inviting viewers to engage with the layers of meaning through witnessing the sitter in tension with their environment; and the hidden personal stories suggested through each image.  

Jade Sweeting explores an intimate relationship with found imagery, motorbikes and objects that are central to her identity. Sweeting’s ongoing research into biker women and the ‘chopper’ culture of the North-East, along with found and recycled imagery, are refined and re-presented by Sweeting through traditional analogue printmaking techniques to create images that are iconic and erotic. Her prints of zips, leather and chains, close-up crops of biker regalia selected by their owners become alternative and intimate portraits by Sweeting of her biker community.  

The title of the exhibition Still Moving references the documentary film portrait of musician Patti Smith by Robert Mapplethorpe, which portrays the unique relationship between Mapplethorpe, the artist and Smith, the subject. The title of the exhibition highlights the intimate relationships between the three artists as well as their unique connection with each sitter. Each artist maintaining a respectful and sensitive collaboration with the sitter.  

Phyllis Christopher (b.1963, Buffalo,NY, USA) is based in Gateshead, UK. Christopher has exhibited nationally and internationally, selected solo exhibitions include 

, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK (2022); 

, Center for Sex and Culture, San Francisco, USA (2012); and 

, Good Vibrations, San Francisco, USA (2011). Selected group exhibitions include 

Still I Rise: Feminisms, Gender, Resistance

, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, UK, and De La Warr Pavaillion, Bexhill-on-Sea, UK (2019);  

, Daniel Cooney Gallery, New York, USA (2018). 

Her work has been featured and reviewed widely in periodicals including FRIEZE, The Guardian, British Journal of Photography, Art Montly and AnOther Magazine.  

Kuba Ryniewicz (b. 1980, Poznan, Poland) is based in the North East of England, UK. He completed his MA in Philosophy at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland in 2005 and carried out his BA in Contemporary Photographic Practice from Northumbria University, UK in 2008. Ryniewicz had exhibited nationally and internationally, selected exhibitions include Parallel Stories from Here, Newcastle Contemporary Art, Newcastle, UK (2022); 

, The NewBridge Project, Newcastle, UK; 3538Org, Paris, France; and Village, Leeds UK (2021). Selected group exhibitions include 

 Southwark Park Galleries, London, UK (2018); 

, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK (2018); and 

, Somerset House, London, UK (2017).  He has worked internationally with clients including Gucci, Loewe, Balenciaga, Google, COS, Stella McCartney, Fantastic Man, Luncheon, BUTT, Dazed, Financial Times, Replica Man, Apartamento, The Gourmand, The Plant, Pleasure Garden, PIN-UP, Vogue Poland, Wired (Japan), Wire, and Wallpaper*. 

Ryniewicz is currently Visiting Fellow at Northern Centre for Photography in Sunderland, UK.  

Jade Sweeting (b. 1987, Middlesborough, UK) is based in Newcastle, UK. She completed her BA in Fine Art: Print Making at Northumbria University in 2010. Sweeting has exhibited nationally including 

 Northern Stage, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK (2022); 

 Middlesborough Institute for Modern Art, Middlesbrough, UK (2021); 

, BALTIC 39, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK and Village, Leeds, UK (2020); 

, The NewBridge Project, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK (2018); and 

, Glasgow International, Glasgow, UK (2018). She has co-curated exhibitions including 

On Our Backs: An Archive Featuring Phyllis Christopher

, The NewBridge Project, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK (2017) and has delivered artist talks nationally and internationally including South London Gallery, Whitworth Gallery and Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art. In 2022 Sweeting worked on 

Kuba Ryniewicz' photograph of a boy laying in the grass in the sun, we can see the top of his head and his hand.

installation photos of 'Still Moving' at Workplace | Newcastle

Still Moving

, a solo exhibition of new works by James Prapaithong. The exhibition explores Prapaithong’s investigation into light and time, and the potential of the artwork to invoke and activate latent emotion and memory.
 

Through a technique of painstakingly working small quantities of pigment deeply into the weave of raw canvas Prapaithong gradually builds hazy, deeply saturated, high contrast paintings that monumentalise fleeting moments captured by the artist on short informal videos. Always shot outside, or through a window looking out, Prapaithong’s scenes are stripped of specificity, temporality and figuration.
Light is the subject and protagonist in Prapaithong’s work, its reflected dance on water seen through the branches of a tree, or its intense solar glare bending light around a silhouetted tree trunk is at once mundane and magical. In his classic novel 

, Marcel Proust describes the experience of recall, triggered by the taste of the crumbs of a Madeleine cake in a cup of tea:

“No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin.[...] And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea”


Like Proust’s Madeleine cake, Prapaithong’s isolated moments become punctums into profound memories. In Prapaithong’s work universal and shared contemplative moments are evoked through the soft, blurred assertions of his imagery. The primordial effect of light interacting with a surface conjures in us the recall of our own past experience of those rare moments where the presence of the world has cut through and interrupted our incessant inner narrative. In this way Prapaithong’s works are both immediate and transcendent, gently coaxing to the sublime as the transient and the infinite are held at once.


(b.1996, Bangkok, Thailand) live and works between London and Bangkok. He received his BA in painting from Wimbledon College of Arts in 2019 and his MA in painting at the Royal College of Art. Recent exhibitions include 

, Old Central St. Martins Building, London; 

a close-up crop of a painting by James Prapaithong of the sun through the trees

Installation shots of James Prapaithong's exhibition Light Rooms at Workplace | London

Light Years

In an era characterised by tumult and flux, where boundaries between reality and simulation blur, the works of Cristian Avram, Eric Bainbridge, Simeon Barclay, Sooim Jeong, Rachel Lancaster and Miko Veldkamp emerge as poignant explorations of the hidden self, fluid identities, and the deceptive nature of the world. As we adapt to a rapidly changing environment dominated by social media, AI, surveillance, and an increasing loss of privacy, these artists employ various strategies to negotiate an increasingly hostile environment, including camouflage, mimesis, masquerade, and evasion, to reveal fragments of truth beneath our constructed existence.


Simeon Barclay navigates complex cultural histories and the intricacies of identity, combining appropriated imagery, text, and sculpture. Drawing from his experiences in Northern England's manufacturing industry, he contrasts industrial life's stark realities with aspirational glamour from sources such as Vogue to address class, masculinity and representation.


Eric Bainbridge's playful assemblages of found objects and everyday materials subvert conventional hierarchies. By dismantling traditional sculptural concerns, Bainbridge exposes our need for order and coherence in the absurdity of an inherently chaotic world. The exhibition presents two works from Bainbridge's seminal 1980s large-scale faux-fur sculpture series.


Miko Veldkamp's lush botanical dreamscapes represent the ever-shifting boundaries between self and other, the familiar and the foreign. Drawing from his experiences of cultural dislocation and displacement, Veldkamp's paintings function as ‘pseudo self-portraits’ that weave together enigmatic cultural references through fluid, translucent layers to explore identity, memory and the multiplicity of self.


Cristian Avram's timeless compositions invite us to grapple with the paradoxes of existence: the merging of past and present and the duality of progress as both an illusion and a catalyst. His paintings capture desolate landscapes and domestic interiors, where human presence is felt through the shadows and reflections of people and the seemingly insignificant objects they have left behind. Avram's scenes, influenced by his experience living in a nation where remnants of the Soviet past coexist with a burgeoning capitalist society, allow them to coexist in dynamic tension.


Sooim Jeong's minimal oil paintings point to the ephemeral nature of memory and the delicate balance between preservation and obliteration. Jeong’s attempts at reconstructing a combination of past memories into the quotidian places around her are contrasted against significant events from her past, sometimes of a brutal or traumatic nature. Through the abstraction of human figures and the use of metaphoric imagery, Jeong captures the essence of our own fragmented experiences, echoing the dialectical relationship between past and present.


Rachel Lancaster's cinematic paintings embody the inherent tension between the familiar and the uncanny. Lancaster's paintings represent detailed fragments of a greater narrative. The process of remaking these images in paint is used to draw out the uncanny and the potential psychological charge within source imagery. By transforming photographic 'stills' into enigmatic oil paintings, Lancaster invites the viewer to confront the constructed nature of reality and the elusive nature of truth.


A cropped image of a painting by Sooim Jeong: Synchronised, 2019 Oil on canvas 100 x 80 cm

Exhibitions