The quiet art of Grace Quiethart

The first major retrospective of the work of Tickleford artist Grace Quiethart takes place this weekend in the Old Tractor Shed Gallery before transferring to the prestigious Kunsthalle Nurnberg at the beginning of September.  Here's a preview with four of Quiethart's most significant canvasses showing the development of her style from her early days as a Bryte Jung Thing to her current position as a National Treasure.

  Cryptogram (1983), Grace Quiethart

Central to her iconography is a single theme: landscape and its representation.  Within the framework of the artistic conception Quiethart reflects on and draws attention to the properties of painting as a medium that are part of the discourse of this genre.  By means of varied self references and references to other things, her contemporary painting locates itself within our visual culture, absorbing influences from photography and film just as much as computer addled design, advertising, comics, cartoons and corrosion.

 Endophyte (1986)

Popular symbols and depictions of plants in old English botanical books are transported into the canon of a kind of painting that remains fundamentally abstract.  In formal terms her natural landscapes and plant paintings recall traditional landscape from the herstory of art, scenarios from children's books and dreams.  Her paintings clearly take as their theme the way various levels of classical pictorial design combined with the contemporary motifs of popular culture.

 Horizon (2003)

The irreverent standardising nature of Quiethart's work, drawing on modernist art history and a faulty colour photocopier, playing with well known genres, vacillating between formalism and representation in the service of a graphical optical experience, recombining elements in witty recontextualisations with a reductive linear sensibility allow the viewer to renew enjoyment by way of pictorial recognition.

Interzone (2014), Grace Quiethart

This exhibition reveals the variety of Quiethart's work, in spite of the reduction of means. Although Grace Quiethart quotes and transforms stereotypes the artist ic structures themselves never ossify.  The artist succeeds again and again in surprising us with their highly varied artistic forms that can be understood inherently from the logic of the works themselves.  The varied forms of representation reveal themselves to be the result of a considered conceptual artistic strategy.

Godfrey Seifermann

director of The Old Tractor Shed Gallery

Gallery owner Game Page told our reporter:

"It's the first time we've used the Old Tractor Shed as a Gallery but it has a wonderful ambience and is a great space for appreciating Art.  The light is that of the garret so you are seeing the paintings as the artist did, in half light.  The smell of straw and the scurrying of rats bring the landscape art of Grace Quiethart to life.  Careful, it's best not to touch any surfaces".

 Welcome to the Old Tractor Shed Gallery.  You are being watched.

the speedboat won by Game Page on Bullseye in 1977 hasn't seen water yet.

There's even Overflow Parking.  

Overflow parking! 

In case there's a rush on