Dead Romantic?

This is the first time four artists have exhibited in John Constable’s former lodgings and studio with an exhibition called ‘Dead Romantic?”

Dead Romantic?

An exhibition of the work of four Brighton based artists in the former lodgings of John Constable. Each artist will interpret a painting from the Romantic Era. Expect to be stimulated by the carnivalesque etchings of Gregory smart, who moves between a language both graphic and painterly, and  draws  upon his circus upbringing and recent adventures in Brazil to raise a curtain on a world where reality and dream conflate to conjure an intoxicating  cocktail of magic realism. Smart will forge an encounter with the artist William Blake.  Peter Harrap’s paintings and prints are about material equivalence, drawing a parallel between scared bodies, arborglyphs on trees and interpreting Constable. Be uplifted by Natasha Kissell’s sublime landscape that hint at a melancholy of loss and longing reflecting on Caspar David Friedrich. Amy Alderson’s nuanced figure paintings draw on her theatrical upbringing. Part glamour and part grime with the dream of success and the reality of the everyday. Alderson’s paintings will also explore the compositions of the French painter Eugene Delacroix dipped with the colour palette of Odilon Redon .

All four create a dynamic mix against the background of Constable’s Brighton lodgings.

Peter Harrap .Born 1975. British/ Romanian artist and curator, His grandparents were exiled from Romania in 1939. Harrap discovered he was living  Constable’s Brighton Lodgings and that Harrap’s studio was Constable’s painting room. Harrap is curating ‘Constable in Brighton’ 8 April – 8 October 2017 for the main galleries of Brighton Museum.

There are 150 paintings that come from Constable’s time in Brighton 1824-1828.

Peter Harrap was an artist curator for the Royal Academy of  Arts in 2010/2011 and is currently an artist curator for Brighton Museum.

Amy Alderson was nearly born on the stage in 1975,- twelve hours after her mother’s punk cabaret gig with the Sadista Sisters, at Ronnie Scott’s in Soho. Amy’s dad was a half Indian half Irish gangster who was in prison for armed robbery at the time.Her mother went on to act  Sid Vicious’ mother in ‘Sid and Nancy’. Amy’s paintings reflects this theatrical childhood

She studied at Hampstead School of Art and Central Saint Martins

Amy has also posed nude for David Bailey!

Gregory Smart , born in 1972, is the great grandson of legendary fairground and circus showmen Billy Smart..

Smart was brought  up in the circus, (his mother a trapeze artist and his father a high wire walker, he himself has worked within the ring), at the family fairground in Littlehampton and also at Windsor Safari Park.

Gregory Smart is a young artist to watch ” – Sue Hubbard, art critic for the Independent, reviewing  Smarts first solo show “Eye Blood You”  in the Independent , April 2009

Natasha Kissell

Born in 1978 in apartheid South Africa her family had to leave after her father was arrested for protesting against the oppressive regime, Kissell found her home in the UK and has been working as an artist since leaving the Royal Academy of Arts in 2003 where Charles Saatchi bought her entire degree show. Catapulting her into the art world she now regularly shows in London and Copenhagen and has even recently had her work bought by the head of LEGO.

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