This summer, Baker Street becomes the newest hub for an exciting variety of art in London. Featuring a wide variety of artists selected for their originality and skill, there’s something for everyone at Hay Hill Gallery: hyper realism, smokily atmospheric abstracts, expressionism and mathematical formulas.
Well-known names are exhibited alongside up-and-coming artists, and while there is not an overarching theme, it does appear that each artist presents their own window on the world, making the gallery walls into a shape-shifting kaleidoscope of ideas and personal histories.
Featured artists:
Jones Keyworth
Often painted on panels of mahogany cut from old doors, Jones Keyworth'soils evoke strange and dark landscapes, exploring themes of memory and perception. Beautiful yet claustrophobic,the landscapes create a sense of unease with patterns of people and trees.
Kenneth Whyte
The works are a combination of classical oil-painted landscapes and angular pastel-hued structures. Taking two ideals of perfection, Whyte plants his futuristic skyscrapers right in the Garden of Eden. This vision of a ‘new earth’ is not a passive one where we sit around on clouds playing harps or talking to animals; it is active, already drawing up the next blueprints for an improved tomorrow.
Ala Bashir
As an artist and physician, Bashir was once not only part of Saddam Hussein’s medical team, but his reluctant confidant too. The artist’s style is easily comparable to that of the surrealists, yet these nightmarish visions are not dreams- they depict the very real suffering he was witnessing daily. Unexpected directions in style often make his work difficult to decipher, whilst recurring signs such as the raven and the mask draw directly from traditional Iraqi imagery.
Ilia Petrovic
Working on large canvases, diptychs and triptychs, Petrovic creates multi-layered paintings with such vibrancy, depth and colour that they create an illusion of a transparent, glass-like world. The viewer can interpret his paintings in a multitude of ways, owing to his experimentation with colour and texture.
Roger Aslin
Aslin’s style is a darkly graphic pop, where images are stripped back to their simplest recognisable forms. As though seen through polarised lenses, the contrasts are highly exaggerated, and geometric patterns emerge from the divisions of dark and light. His subjects are always given context by their surroundings: from dramatic lines of architecture to the lettering on a billboard.
MacAlpine Miller
MacAlpine Miller is a highly imaginative Neo-Figurative Op artist. His works are based on the notion that we live in a throw away culture, and question the importance we attach to material things. Celebrity, fame, money and greed are depicted through his comic imagery, emphasising the fact they have been manufactured for a temporary audience.
Lilia Mazurkevich
Having held countless sell-out solo exhibitions around the globe, Mazurkevich is now hailed as one of contemporary art's elite. Her unique style of hyper-realism and subject matter offer a glimpse into a world of intrigue and imagination, often incorporating an incredibly subtle vein of humour, unrivalled in complexity.
P. J. Crook
A recurring theme within P. J. Crook's work is crowd interaction.Alain Coudert writing in Arts Actualities Magazine, Paris says of her work: "The world according to P. J. Crook is full of individuals losing their identities in a crowd, where they are packed tightly like sardines in a tin. But this is not sad, it is merely a symptom of an age which tends to walk on its head."