Kilmany-Jo Liversage
'Ordamental515'
5 May - 30 May 2015

This Spring, Hay Hill Gallery is proud to present the paintings of South African artist Kilmany-Jo Liversage. As her first solo exhibition in the UK, Ordamental515 promises to be a refreshing fusion of street art and modern day portraiture.

"Ordamental515 is derived from the combination of my street name Orda and ‘ornamental.’ The numeric value refers to the month and year of the show – May (5), 20(15). Ordamental515 is the deconstruction and subsequent reconstruction of portraiture borrowing elements from urban culture and social media." - Kilmany-Jo Liversage

Liversage chooses her subjects from both people she knows and social media. Looking at her paintings, viewers will experience several déjà vus, as if they already crossed path with these people while walking through the city. Borrowing elements from urban culture, like tagging names and dates, but painting her subjects in fine art poses (mostly frontal or three-quarter), Liversage developed a style that is equally potent and moving.

Roxana Halls
'Unknown Women'
5 May - 30 May 2015

“The quiet mystery of a head which will never turn, intimate yet remote, the face forever unseen, is a subject I have found myself drawn to investigate repeatedly. My figures may seem frozen in a place of stasis and reflection, in the eye of the storm, attempting to reconfigure themselves and perhaps on the cusp of transformation, but they are always on the verge of some private evolution”.

In Unknown Women, Roxana Halls' third solo exhibition for Hay Hill Gallery, the identities of the artist's subjects, as the title suggests, forever elude us.

We find ourselves irresistibly drawn to Halls' Unknown Women, yet they perpetually refuse our gaze. We cannot help but wish to turn the women around to see their faces, to lift the plate or unpin the paper which covers them, and yet they evade our curiosity, offering to disclose only a glimpse.

Just as the unidentified subject of Baudelaire's poem La Chevelure, a hymn to a beautiful head of hair, inspires the lover to 'sow rubies, pearls and sapphires' into the 'ebony sea' of her 'strong tresses', Halls, in her Backs series, adorns her women with bewitching clues as to their identity, or of what they may be in the process of passing through.

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, Anne Tanner, Sam Shendi, Ruurd Hallema, and Oleg Prokofiev.

E-mail: info@hayhillgallery.com