Hannah Brown Exhibition at The China Shop Gallery

Hannah Brown

Time Hangs Heavy

21 January - 25 February 2012 Preview 20 January 2012, 7pm - 9pm

Hannah Brown describes herself unapologetically as an English landscape painter. Working within and against the omnipresent legacy of the English landscape tradition, she searches for quiet, often overlooked places with a peculiar type of beauty and makes intimate oil paintings that at first appear archaic.

The images Brown creates are carefully mediated versions of our landscape. They are idealistic images that empty the landscape of people and obvious signs of life only to play god with the weather, the time of day and sometimes even the content. What starts as a kind of ode to our landscape results in work with a prevailing sense of menace due to the untruths in her execution and the muted palette she favours.

Brown is interested in the paradoxical desire to seek beauty within the natural environment and then promptly alter it by creating her own version; to hold a lasting possession of a place by imposing her description, thoughts or ideals. Her paintings often get darker as the works progress and the flat grey English light that is so familiar slowly replaces painted blue skies.

For Time Hangs Heavy, Brown brings together a body of paintings alongside an ornamental sculpture, which appears to be ceramic, referencing Majolica or Chelsea Porcelain. She sees the sculpture as a three-dimensional painting; the result of her working process that she describes as going into an image and coming out with an object. The pieces are all connected by their surfaces of innumerous glazed layers of oil paint and when exhibited together raise questions about our relationship to, and tastes for, bucolic imagery.

Hannah Brown lives and works in London and previously studied at the Royal College of Art and Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design. She has recently exhibited at Gimpel Fils Gallery and Gallery Primo Alonso, London and was selected for the Threadneedle Prize and APT Creekside Open in 2011.

The China Shop is open Saturdays 10am - 4pm.