Art Exhibitions

27 February 2020

99 Loop Gallery is delighted to present new solo exhibitions by three South African female artists - Nicole Clare Fraser, Mia Darling and Clare Menck. With plasticine artworks, works of photography and oil paintings on display, our upcoming shows are as varied as they are intriguing and intimate.

 

 

Nicole Clare Fraser's exhibition, 'untitled (façade)', is an exploration of space and object. The spaces captured by Fraser are everyday places she has encountered and recorded with a critical eye, looking closely at compositional elements and a soft sense of tonality. Fraser's photography explores a sense of quiet, solitude and the mundane in a poetically atmospheric manner. The images are captured on 35mm black and white film and are hand-printed in the darkroom by the artist.

 

 

Mia Darling's plasticine paintings revolve around love rituals, mysticism in daily life and beauty as a form of magic. In these paintings, Darling's figures sit in carved frames. They are a reflection fixed in the mirror, contained in a world that exists behind glass, like a snow globe. Distorted and strange, as if in a dream, the figures clasp hands, discover shells and pin butterflies. They think they look rather nice in the mirror and they lean out of windows to smile at passers-by. Mirage-like, they shimmer and shift with heat and touch, like plasticine snakes rolled with your hands.

 

 

Reflections in water are the common denominator that weaves a transient connection between the works of 'Mirrored' by Clare Menck. In these paintings, figures are portrayed wading, exploring and often contemplating, and in keeping with Menck's body of work - they exist in or near water. Menck's familiar painterly voice is seen in the abstractions that occur when water distorts everything above the waterline. Sometimes, Menck's water is still as glass and at other times, the disturbance of its surface results in fascinating visual echoes of the reflected human figures. In a deeper resonance of the theme, these works act as a reflection of the artist's inner world as she witnesses, captures and 'mirrors' specially chosen moments of her life in paint.

99 LOOP

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