Leyden Gallery's forthcoming exhibition is Platform for Emerging Arts 6. This mixed media exhibition, of both international and home grown art, presents a diverse group of young and emerging talent in one of East London's most vibrant art spaces. Leyden Gallery's sixth Platform for Emerging Arts promises a varied and powerful show of art from seven talented emerging artists. Amongst them are four international artists; one of whom has just become a major prize-winner in Australia. Six of the seven artists in this show are women, a fact which is mentionable, as it bucks the trend of many galleries, even today, who still insist on showing a dominance of art from men artists.

Responding to a call-out for emerging art these seven artists have been selected for their promise and skill by Adriana Cerne & Lindsay Moran, the gallery directors and curators of the Platform exhibitions. As always, Leyden Gallery has shown its astute judgement in recognising emerging talent. Their perception has in the past produced artists, who have gone on to both critical acclaim and commercial success.

With the development of each of Leyden Gallery’s Platform shows there is a fabulous opportunity for the public to both see and buy art from emerging artists at a critical early stage of their careers.

Participating Artists:

Aleksandra Laika – A figurative artist who draws her inspiration from the intricately worked patterns of Slavic arts and crafts and rich colours of Russian iconography. Her narrative works swing between reality and fantasy; the reality is represented in the fragile medium of graphite and the fantasy appears in bold paint and ink. The dreamlike and the quotidian share the same canvas, exchanging places unexpectedly. Her works appear not to fully exist in either world, but remain constantly spinning and morphing. Decorative and rich in appearance they generate an underlying feeling of displacement.

Hannah Edward - Leyden Gallery will be the first to exhibit Edward’s new body of work Postcard Landscapes; works which aim to explore the universality of the contours and structures present in landscapes. Through alterations that explore the materiality of images and re-create the illusion of distance and depth, she reveals the tension and flatness inherent within any two-dimensional image. Since graduating from Edinburgh College of Art Edward has exhibited her work internationally & undertaken two residencies.

Jenna Harper – Harper recently graduated in Fine and Applied Art at Canterbury. Ambiguity as a concept informs much of her work, which often deals with questions pertaining to meaning and interpretation. Whilst she works mainly from photographs, she aims to abstract the subject matter, giving it new meaning through colour and material choices. The use of pinks and glazed surfaces in her paintings suggests grotesque, fleshy substances. These works draw on a variety of influences, from Jenny Saville to Judy Chicago.

John Tedstone - The paintings Tedstone create imply a world of escapism, suggesting a form of flight from the modern world; the images, simultaneously suggestive of both the comic and the tragic are submerged between bathos myth & nostalgia. The characters are drawn from his inspiration in the natural world, particularly British wildlife. This work although not focused upon any particular social, cultural or political commentary, nevertheless opens up to reoccurring themes of loneliness and isolation. This will be Tedstone’s first exhibition.

Lisa Kotoulas – Although Kotoulas has shown extensively in Sydney, Australia since 2009, this will be her first exhibition in London. Kotoulas engages in moments where the masquerades of daily life are disrupted, aiming to create spaces of reflection, by way of considering the canvas as a type of mirror. These occasionally confronting images facilitate a gateway of deep introspection. Her preoccupation with the idea of Self is nevertheless supported by an intense observation of others. Convinced that answers can only emerge by looking outward, she attempts to seize instances where emotion is unlocked.

Marta Pieregonczuk - A Polish artist who also trained as a journalist, Pieregonczuk grew up in Communist Poland, where she claims to have found expression through her drawings and paintings, as a way of bringing colour into her world. This beginning has continued to inspire the art that she creates today. Her primary preoccupation is expressing the human condition with a special emphasis on meaning, mortality and the inevitability of loneliness. She uses traditional artist’s mediums such as oil, ink, charcoal and pencil. While sculpting she experiments with various materials and techniques in an aim to create realistic effects.

Ros Paton – Award-winning artist Paton, explores how revealing the impermanence of our constructions can act as metaphor for the fragility of human existence. Her work shows the poignancy and strange beauty that emerge as the palimpsest of familiar layers in our built environment disintegrate. Paton’s work is not about the triumph of nature, but an intermediate moment, a fragile equilibrium between persistence and decay, stability and disarray. Aiming to imbue her artwork with something deeper than a clever depiction of image, it invites contemplation on the ephemeral nature of our surroundings, on beauty and human existence.