Hus Gallery is pleased to announce The Back of Beyond, an exhibition of new and recent works by Adam Bainbridge, Sam Irons and Neil Raitt. Through the diverse mediums of drawing, photography and painting, the exhibited artists explore the possibility of a reality beyond what is readily seen. This frequently involves the mutation, reconstitution and repetition of an image or object in order to alienate it from its origin, thus allowing for a new order of visual association to take place.

Neil Raitt was born in Leicester, UK in 1986. He studied at the Royal College of Art and Norwich University College of the Arts where he received his MA in Painting and BA (Hons) in Fine Art, respectively. Raitt produces large-scale oil paintings that explore the excessive nature of visual language and the landscape of painting within the digital age. His appropriation of familiar natural iconography - alpine mountains and evergreen trees - is a practice in repetition, blurring the lines between figuration and abstraction. Hugely immersive, his paintings draw the viewer in through a sort of hypnosis, whilst simultaneously rejecting human interaction because of the cold, abrasive and disorienting infinity of the alpines.

Sam Irons was born in London, UK in 1978. He received a BA (Hons) in English Literature at Trinity College before going on to Brighton University where he gained a BA (Hons) in Photography. Irons’ work is based on the idea of disruption, the combination of discordant genres of images in a way that upsets the viewers’ presuppositions of what they’re looking at and what it might mean. In using the photographic frame to focus on, and exaggerate, form and texture in his photographs, Irons de-locates his landscapes from their original environment. In doing so, they are removed from a distinguishable time or place, and a new dialogue of visual association is forced to emerge.

Adam Bainbridge was born in Boston, Lincolnshire in 1982. He completed his foundation studies at Lincoln College of Art & Design, before going on to gain a BA (Hons) in Fine Arts at the Slade School (2007) and a MA in Fine Art Painting at the Royal College of Art (2010). Adam Bainbridge uses model making as a departure point for the production for highly detailed pencil drawings. His work considers the representational process of drawing, and focuses on expanding his conclusions in a very literal way. His initial starting points are ordinary objects belonging to suburbia and the working middle class, but these are distorted in each piece to create an alternative metaphysical reality where new and uncertain narratives are allowed to develop.