Mary West

Mary West

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Degree: Fine Art
University: Slade School of Fine Art
Graduation Year: 2002

New Blood Art Commentary

See Investable Artists
Looking at a garden, its blur of colour and form, is an experience emergent into abstraction: the loss of individual outlines of flowers and grassess in the cacophony of the whole. The garden is also the hybrid place of artifice and nature – as is abstract painting, in the work of Mary West.

Ilse d’hollander, whose paintings also hang delicately between abstraction and representation of natural phenomena, said that “it is painting itself that always remains fundamental”: like d’hollander, West is a painter’s painter. As their often temporalising titles evoke, West's paintings are rooted in moments of personal experience. An achievement spans the work: the effect of simultaneity in the layers of paint. This texture contributes a naturalism: the paint appears to have been applied in exactly the place it should be.

Artist Statement

My paintings are rooted in landscape, but as I paint they take on a life of their own. Veering between abstraction and figuration, the initial intuitive marks I make and the drips of paint provide a framework from which the painting can emerge. The paint itself becomes subject matter. Memory, snippets of conversation and shared experiences filter into my work. The titles of the paintings are important, often hinting at human interaction.

Solo Exhibitions

(2023) Fleeting Light, The Hyde Gallery, London

(2004) Out of shot, Tricycle Gallery, London

Group Exhibitions

(2023) Gallery Artists, The Hyde Gallery, London

(2023) Open Call Winners, Partnership Editions, London

(2023) Affordable Art Fair, Lucinda Dalton Gallery, London

(2023) The Winter Exhibition III, Lucinda Dalton Gallery, London

(2022) Visions of Healing, Brushes with Greatness, London

(2022) A Room of Her Own, Irving Contemporary, Oxford

(2022) Winter Exhibition, Thrown Contemporary, Online

(2022) Unity: British and Ukrainian Art, The Art Unit, London

(2022) Works on Paper 4, Blue Shop Cottage, London

(2022) Precious Postcards, Hollywood Road Gallery, London

(2022) Art for Ukraine, The Auction Collective, Online

(2013) Atomic, Transition Gallery, London