LILY SENNER: HEAVEN ON EARTH
15th July - 13th August 2022
Red Forest
Lily Senner is a painter based in Newcastle upon Tyne. She studied Fine Art at The Royal Drawing School and Newcastle University. Working from memory and imagination, her work creates a playful tension between utopia and dystopia, questioning what our legacy on our surrounding environments will look like. She uses a colourful, bold, synthetic colour palette which alludes to an ambiguous sickly-ness, that infects her fantastical, pulsating works. Senner’s striking painterly style draws the viewer into her work visually, then creates a sense of uncertainty as the subtle narrative unfolds.
The Walled Garden, Jesmond
Senner works in a variety of media including oil, acrylic, watercolour, and marker pen. Her process is spontaneous; the smaller works on paper are created entirely unplanned. She enjoys the immediacy of the bold colours in these works and allows them to dictate where the imagery goes. Her larger works on canvas utilise smaller works or sketches from location as starting points. Senner lets the painting dictate its direction organically, allowing the works to take on a presence of their own, and revealing unusual repeating motifs. For instance, Senner’s mystical swimming pools are a frequent motif within her work. They represent a complete departure from reality and are engulfed by a sense of fantasy and wonder.
‘Heaven On Earth’ brings together drawings and paintings created during the COVID-19 pandemic. The imagery in this show is largely inspired by her solo walks around Newcastle during lockdown including Jesmond Dene, Heaton Park, and The Town Moor. There is sense of isolation and uncertainty in the paintings, but simultaneously an atmosphere of joy. The landscapes in the paintings encapsulate the way our relationship to our surroundings was challenged during the pandemic. Senner’s pandemic landscapes show a newfound joy in exploring her immediate surroundings with an underlying sense of insecurity, reflecting the unpredictable nature of the period.
Marker Studies
Lily Senner is an award-winning painter whose work in held in private collections across the UK, Japan, and the USA. She’s a recipient of The Artist Collecting Society Materials Prize and has exhibited her work at The Tub in Hackney, Pineapple Black Gallery in Sheffield, Copeland Park Gallery in London and Vane, The Abject Gallery and The NewBridge Project in Newcastle. She is a member of The Working-Class Creative Database.
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