EMMA BENNETT: ABOVE GROUND
23rd July - 4th September 2021
Department Store (Striped Building), 2021, Acrylic on gesso panel, 40.7 x 50.8cm
Above Ground is an exhibition of bold minimalist paintings which reflect the design of Modernist and Post-War Architecture by Middlesbrough based artist Emma Bennett. By using colour and pattern in conjunction with her personal connections to place, Bennett examines our localised social histories.
Many of her paintings reference a nostalgic attachment to places and structures that are often overlooked, neglected or under threat of demolition. While growing up on a post-war council estate in the northern town of Redcar, Emma developed an attraction to the materials and surroundings of her environment. Many of the modernist and post-war buildings from her childhood have since been demolished and others are in the process of vanishing. Her work declares the architectural beauty and social importance of these places, buildings that are part of our collective memory.
Department Store (Black & Grey Stairway), 2021, Acrylic on gesso panel, 40.7 x 50.8cm
The colours in her earlier work are influenced by paintings and sculptures of the St. Ives School, an influential artistic community living and working in St Ives, Cornwall in the early twentieth century. She has since created her own colour palette often using vibrant colour combinations. Emma uses photography as a key part of her process, which develops through a set of decisions about the relationships between colour and form. The introduction of pattern in Emma’s work began a few years ago while researching the artist Anni Albers and her use of pattern in screen-prints and tapestry weaving.
For this exhibition at Gallagher & Turner Bennett presents a series of paintings responding to the exterior architecture of the 1950s House of Fraser Department Store in Middlesbrough that was formerly known as Binns. The painting series reflects the artist’s nostalgic connection to place and questions the future of these once monumental buildings.
Emma Bennett, wall painting at MIMA as part of Sonia Boyce, In the Castle Of My Skin, 2021
Selected exhibitions and prizes include Baltic Open 2020; ING Discerning Eye 2020; Traces of Reality, PS Mirabel; Major Conversations: The Industrial Narrative, The Turnpike; Manchester Contemporary; High Rise (solo), South Square, Bradford and Altered Space (solo) Platform A Gallery. Emma was awarded a Runner-Up Prize in the KPP Prize for Art, Architecture and Design. In 2019 she gained an MA in Fine Art (Distinction) at Mima School of Art and Design. Her work was recently acquired by Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art. She is currently producing works for a public art project in Middlesbrough and has made a new wall painting as part of a summer 2021 exhibition titled Sonia Boyce: In the Castle of My Skin at MIMA.
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