Lydia Gifford: Drawn

BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead presents an entirely new body of work by Lydia Gifford produced for BALTIC’s ground floor gallery space.

Drawn will be Gifford’s first solo exhibition in a UK institution. Exploring her ongoing concern with the language of painting and the balance between painting and object, the exhibition will be a choreographed series of encounters, gestures and conversations.

Gifford’s works engage with each other and dance in palpable rhythm; there is a raw physicality in the works, which are all made within the artist’s own dimensions. While large-scale paintings take on the weight of a human figure, they stand silent witness to smaller works that take on human gestures. Lap 2014, for example, takes its title from a temporary bodily space, a place of potential interaction suggested by the work as it curves gently from the wall as if yielding to another’s embrace.