Changing Room - Stirling's gallery for art

Dirk Bell, Kate Davis, Alan Michael
25 January – 15 March 2003

An exhibition centred on three artists’ use of drawing and other media to make images with multiple meanings around notions of memory, representation, beauty and layering of images.

Dirk Bell made a series of drawings and watercolours in which ephemeral figures and imagery appear. They refer to his experience of the world and memories of other imagery, with subjects that are often extraneous within gothic and romantic landscapes or hidden within mirror images. His works are often quickly rendered, but reveal a talent for working in different styles. Shown together the works reflected a stream of consciousness and a belief in the Romantic ideal.

In her work Kate Davis pushed images from the natural and manufactured world towards abstraction to make meticulously rendered drawings, that play with the representation of beauty, symmetry and evolution. Using the pencil as a tool to question how our expectation of an image can alter sight, Davis attempts to offer an alternative pattern, which is open to multiple readings.

Alan Michael composed complex images in different styles and media, at times utilising figures appropriated from works by an eclectic mixture of Twentieth Century figurative painters including Balthus, Lucien Freud, Modigliani, Georgia O’Keefe and Phillip Pearlstein. Michael’s interest is in transformations or distortions of culture and in the currency and capital of quotation.

Minerals in the Water catalogue available (£1.50), that accompanied this show and celebrated The Changing Room’s 5^th Anniversary.

See Publications for ordering details.

Dirk Bell’s work courtesy of BQ, Cologne.

Exhibition supported by Scottish Arts Council and Goethe Institute, Glasgow.

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