Adrienne Gaha is featured in Art Collector issue 94, October to December, 2020.
What drives Adrienne Gaha’s latest work is the myriad different interpretations waiting to be discovered in paint.
Gaha’s work reaches into art history with oblique references to narrative painters like Titian, Rupert Bunny, Bouguereau. The images are rubbed out, painted over, and heavily abstracted, conjoined with contemporary references. Their aesthetic contains touchstones, a sense of familiarity that is hard to pin down but speaks to our recognition of well-known historical paintings and their tropes, juxtaposed with pop culture references (cartoons, the Disney image) and animals. This method of working, where Gaha paints, wipes back with turpentine, glazes, builds, drips and pools paint is, as artist Brooke Fitzsimons suggests, a space where figuration coexists with abstraction in such a way as to address the maxims of modernism.
- Louise Martin-Chew
IMAGE:
Adrienne Gaha, courtesy Jacquie Manning