Diana Copperwhite: Onomatopeia
Flowers Gallery, London
10 January - 17 February 2024
Morocco, 2023
Oil on canvas, 230 x 300cm
© Diana Copperwhite, courtesy of Flowers Gallery
Flowers Gallery presents Irish painter DIANA COPPERWHITE's first solo exhibition with the gallery. This selection of new paintings marks an extension of the artist's lauded use of abstraction to explore notions of memory and perception against the visual chaos of twenty-first century life. The exhibition shares its title with Diana Copperwhite's touring show that took place at Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda, Limerick City Gallery of Art, Limerick and Galway International Arts Festival between March and July 2023.
Painting for Copperwhite is a means of systematizing information, which she describes as "giving the unseen world visual form." Derived from her lifelong interest in chemistry and physics, she visualises the canvas as a kind of "notational system". Her distinctive, undulating, kinetic streaks of colour appear at once autonomous, like light through a prism, and diagrammatic, as if mapping and charting forces invisible to the naked eye.
Four large new paintings Disjointed Entropy, Neural, Morocco and Seclusion (all 2023) are expansive, theatrical manifestations of these ideas - at three metres wide they constitute, Copperwhite reflects, "their own environments." Her lyrical and dynamic textural forms are articulated with a brush or knife, giving the surface of the work an almost architectural quality. In part a reaction to the grey weather of her Irish home, her approach to colour is equally expressive, demonstrating her proclivity towards bold hues in the pulsating rainbows of Seclusion, moody blues of Neural and dynamic pinks of Morrocco.
A series of accompanying smaller paintings, Notes on Lightness, Notes on Darkness, feature faceless figures, painted with colour bands across their faces, both reflecting the dematerialisation of individual identity in an increasingly technological world and stressing the persistence of human presence.
Neural, 2023
Oil on canvas, 223 x 335cm
© Diana Copperwhite, courtesy of Flowers Gallery
DIANA COPPERWHITE (b.1969) is one of Ireland’s leading abstract painters. She received her Diploma in Painting from Limerick School of Art & Design in 1992, before completing her undergraduate at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin in 1994 and a Masters at Winchester School of Art and Design, Barcelona in 2000. She has since exhibited widely nationally and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include Onomatopeia, Limerick City Gallery of Art, Limerick, and Highlanes Municipal Art Gallery, Drogheda (2023); and Driven by Distraction, Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, (2016). Notable group exhibitions include Shelter, National Gallery of Ireland (2023); It Took a Century: Women Artists and the RHA, National Gallery of Ireland, (2023); The Pleasure Ground, Rathfarnham Castle, Dublin, (2022); Mark Rothko Centre, Daugavpils, Latvia, (2018); Virtú, Hunt Museum, Limerick, (2017); and The Art of a Nation, Mall Galleries, London, (2015). Copperwhite first showed with Flowers Gallery in 2022, having been selected by Sean Scully for his curated show celebrating Irish and British talent Hidden UK, Hidden Ireland. She lives and works in Dublin.
FLOWERS GALLERY
21 Cork Street, London W1S 3LZ