True Colours: Helen Beard / Sadie Laska / Boo Saville - Newport Street Gallery

Boo Saville, Perseus (The Hero), 2018

True Colours - Helen Beard /  Sadie Laska / Boo Saville is at the Newport Street Gallery until 9 September 2018.
From the gallery website:
‘True Colours’ brings together three emerging artists - Helen Beard (b.1971, Birmingham), Sadie Laska (b.1974, West Virginia) and Boo Saville (b.1980, Norwich) - that, despite using paint in very different ways, all share an interest in exploring the possibilities of colour. Featuring fifty works, the show is the largest exhibition to date for each artist.
Helen Beard uses a vivid rainbow palette to create interlocking arrangements of bright primary colour, which combine to describe explicit sexual encounters. Working from found images, Beard’s work explores themes relating to gender, sexual psychology and eroticism. Situated part way between abstraction and representation, her figures are reduced to concisely defined fields of vibrant colour, on which a myriad of varied brush marks remain visible.
New York-based artist Sadie Laska creates dreamlike compositions using paint and collage. Evoking the rebellious post-Pop aesthetic of New York, Laska often incorporates recycled waste materials and found objects into her paintings, sometimes reworking parts of earlier canvases entirely. In Untitled (Pepsi Shape), 2017, the canvas is carved up into contrasting areas, which are roughly painted with acrylic. The resulting amorphous shape evokes the distinctive colours of a can of Pepsi. A member of the underground drum-based band I.U.D., Laska’s paintings are filled with a similar improvised expressiveness and irreverent spirit of performance as her music.
The exhibition features a new series of Boo Saville’s colour field paintings, which are shown in dialogue with a number of black and white canvases. Known formerly for her figurative works in oil on canvas, as well as using everyday materials including biro and bleach, Saville has – since 2014 – been producing large-scale abstracts, made up of flawlessly gradating shades. Saville, whose work investigates mortality, applies up to forty layers of paint to achieve this extraordinary effect, erasing any suggestion of her own mark-making in spite of the emotional tenor of the works. The colour fields are inextricably linked to her black and white canvases, the subjects of the latter – sparingly painted so as to retain the appearance of the canvas weave – resulting from internet searches that occur to her whilst working on the abstracts. She notes: “The black and white paintings are purely about the surface of momentary thought and the colour fields are about the depth and vault of emotion and memory layered on top of each other.”

Boo Saville with one of her paintings

Helen Beard with her painting, Cyssan, 2017

Sadie Laska with one of her paintings

Boo Saville, Cassiopeia (The Queen), 2018

Boo Saville, Installation view - True Colours at Newport Street Gallery

Boo Saville, Installation view - True Colours at Newport Street Gallery

Helen Beard, Each Peach Pear Plum, 2017

Helen Beard, Blue Valentine, 2017

Helen Beard, Shining the Kitchen Floor, 2018

Helen Beard, Installation view - True Colours at Newport Street Gallery

Helen Beard, Installation view - True Colours at Newport Street Gallery

Sadie Laska, Untitled (Geometric I), 2017

Sadie Laska, Home, 2018

Watch video of Katy Hessel talking to the artists and introducing the exhibition.
MK Palomar (Studio International) - review and videos of conversations with the artists in the exhibition.