Saffron Newey

Pools of Sorrow; Waves of Joy | Saffron Newey

 

Pools of Sorrow; Waves of Joy | Saffron Newey

28 February - 18 March, 2023

Weaving a capricious path through five centuries of western painting, Pools of Sorrow; Waves of Joy visits upon histrionic moments. The works pay homage to movements such as Australian mysticism, the Italian, Dutch and Spanish Baroque, Preraphaelitism, Norwegian Romanticism and even banal stock imagery.

A series of eight oil paintings feature new collaged narratives; figures appear in unfamiliar landscapes, conjuring atmospheres that are at once magical and alien. Nymphs, animals, pastoral scenes and night skies have been summoned from historical artworks and online archives. Their new union in these works evoke curiosity and polarised emotions. Gratuity, melodrama, melancholy and the mundane all congress from divergent points. Together, in a cacophony of lost voices, scenes of sublime joy and inky darkness coexist.

Accompanying the paintings is a series of palimpsests - each artwork consists of layered mono prints, silverpoint and ink drawings which likewise, source historical images but also automatic drawing and imaginary motifs.

Like a cloud of cyphers, an incongruent constellation Pools of Sorrow; Waves of Joy imagines the lost details of history, floating, clashing and moving ever distantly apart and together again.


 

Lost Pastoral | Saffron Newey

 

Lost Pastoral | Saffron Newey

7 October - 1 November 2020

Jan Manton Gallery is pleased to present Saffron Newey's latest exhibition Lost Pastoral showing from 7 October - 1 November, 2020

Lost Pastoral features reminiscences of Romantic landscape paintings, hazy and soft focused, devoid of definition and divorced from their original contexts. Painters Louis Buvelot (Swiss-Australian), Hans Güde (Norwegian), Eugene von Guerard (Austrian-Australian) and Albert Bierstadt (German-American) have been appropriated in this series to present a remembrance of Romantic landscape history painting... Within this body of work the Romantic sublime meets its contemporary, online counterpart – the digital sublime. The latter is a space in which time, place and context become miscellaneous and “other” worlds evolve.
— Saffron Newey