BELLA FOSTER AND BLAIR SAXON-HILL: STILL LIVES
Shanghai—Pearl Lam Galleries is delighted to announce the duo exhibition Still Lives, featuring works by Bella Foster and Blair Saxon-Hill.
November 22, 2024 - February 8, 2025
Still Lives highlights the evolving nature of still life painting, emphasising individual expression and emotional depth. The two California-based female artists bring new perspectives to these traditional genres, using everyday fragments and serendipity as their subjects to celebrate what our lives have to offer. By embracing the everyday, their direct painting approaches allow them to create intimate visual realities. Influenced by modernism, their revisionist approaches towards colour and surface treatment are personal yet independent of the objects they depict. The subdued style of their paintings creates a sense of stillness or a reverse gaze to entice beholders to form psychological attachments with the artwork on view. This reciprocal approach resonates with late Italian painter and printmaker Giorgio Morandi’s idea of valuing moods above all else, merging shapes into abstract images to evoke tranquillity and privacy.
Bella Foster’s artistic practice centres on still lifes that intimately depict the spaces of her friends and her own, blending real and imagined domestic environments. Her paintings transcend mere representation, engaging in a psychological inquiry into the intersubjective experiences that shape our connection to the objects within these spaces. Through her lens, the seemingly mundane transforms into a poignant exploration of solitude and desolation, revealing a world beyond material objects where we find meaning and spiritual sustenance.
Drawing inspiration from artists like Pierre Bonnard and Georgia O’Keeffe, Foster employs a distinctive economy of colour hues that conveys a flat picture plane, foreshortening our reading of the artworks with rhythm and repetition. Far from mere depictions of ordinary scenes, Foster’s works are not meant to reflect on spaces or objects we desire to own, but rather the deeper meaning embodied by them, presenting unexpected juxtapositions that challenge conventional notions of the still life genre. Ultimately, her paintings animate stillness, transforming quotidian objects into profound inquiries of human psychology and materiality.
Saxon-Hill choreographs her characters into psychological engagements that express a longing for connection. Influenced by the CoBrA art movement, she melds figuration and abstraction to create an ever-expanding cast of imagined characters. In short, Saxon-Hill’s paintings celebrate love, sincerity, and the beauty found in everyday life.