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Zoe Benbow
'A Different View'
29 June - 25 July 2015

Zoe Benbow’s paintings aim to communicate a sense of awe and enjoyment in landscape, as a means of questioning our cultural construct of wilderness and our relationship to the natural world. The images are developed from drawings made ‘in the field’, yet by an intense engagement with the processes of painting and studio practice, the resulting canvases become as much a meditation on geology of association and memory as of an actual place.

Benbow’s experience of walking and drawing in landscape is that everything – light, wind, vegetation and stones – are shifting, sliding, moving with every moment. Contrary to the quest for achieving long distance or summit she enjoys meandering, searching, looking and often bizarrely napping and dreaming in protected hollows. Exploring a micro–macro dynamic, she is interested in the experience of landscape as intimate and surrounding as opposed to distancing and remote.

Patrick Altes
'Frayed Ideologies'
29 June - 25 July 2015

‘Frayed Ideologies’ presents the latest paintings by the internationally acclaimed artist Patrick Altes and invites us to consider the struggle to define ourselves, and the process of being human. The work relates to the melting pots and breaking points of land, conflict, and diaspora. It refers to our living in times of extreme turbulence and instability – both political and environmental - and herald dreams and resurgences from the unconscious linked to the artist's personal vision and perception of the world.

Patrick Altes was born on the African continent and consciously and unconsciously shaped by it as well as his feeling of not really being French. His “political engagement” against the notion of colonialism has robbed him of his right to feel for the land where he was born and guilt at celebrating it.

Were his passport Algerian, feeling nostalgia for his birth country when estranged from it would be natural; with a French passport, it becomes suspect.  Yet he claims the part of Algerian-ness in him and posits himself technically and emotionally as an African Diaspora artist refusing the dominant pied-noir narrative, which repositions Algeria as a paradise lost whilst marginalising the deep racial inequalities, discrimination and repression which were at the heart of colonial rule.

He lives and works in the UK, trained as an artist in Ecuador, France and England and graduated from the University of Brighton with an MA Fine Art in 2008. He was twice recipient of a prestigious Leverhulme Trust Award, he is widely exhibited and has work held in numerous public and private collections.

Hay Hill Gallery also presents a sculpture collection which features works by Eleanor Cardozo, Nicola Godden, Richard L.Minns, Andy Cheese, Jamie McCartney, Ian Edwards, Gianfranco Meggiato, Alfonso & Massimiliano Cacchiarelli Principi, David Mayer, Roland Piché, Palolo Valdés, Sam Shendi, Ruurd Hallema, and Oleg Prokofiev.

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E-mail: info@hayhillgallery.com