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Exhibition

Isabella Dyson and Chris Dyson

Terra Firma

29 March – 27 April 2024

Venue: The Grey Gallery, 4 Helmsley Place, London Fields, London, E8 3SB

The title of this exhibition, Terra Firma, denotes substance: dry land, solid ground. In these uncertain times, the works of Isabella Dyson and Chris Dyson convey stability in landscapes and still life paintings, and in buildings that endure.
London-based artist, Isabella Dyson and her father, architect Chris Dyson, explored the shared ideals of their disciplines in this collaborative exhibition. Their works reflect a similar pursuit of serenity and visual enjoyment, in different ways expressing form, beauty, light, emotion and craft. Isabella’s paintings capture imagined landscapes inspired by Suffolk’s coastlines and big skies, while Chris’s drawings reflect a way of thinking about space, and committing places, forms and ideas to memory through a sketch.
At Grey Gallery, they presented a curated selection of recent paintings and drawings that highlighted how art and architecture intertwine – and in the process, offered new perspectives on the work of each.

Image left: Isabella Dyson, Suffolk Cornfield at Night, 2024
Image right: Chris Dyson, Truman Boiler House from Brick Lane, 2024

Exhibition

Carol Robertson + Trevor Sutton

Heaven Earth and Human Beings

2 November – 8 December 2024

Venue: The Grey Gallery, 4 Helmsley Place, London Fields, London, E8 3SB

The title of this exhibition takes its meaning from ancient wisdom, believing Heaven = the Circle, Earth = the Square and Human Beings = the Triangle. (Korean Cheonbu concept of the Dangun era).
London artists Carol Robertson and Trevor Sutton have lived and worked side by side in Hackney for 40 years, producing reductive geometric abstract paintings, prints and works on paper. Both use the circle square and triangle and both artists absorb a take on life re-ordered by careful geometry and associative colour: their work is never entirely disconnected from the real world. Robertson works with a variety of geometric formations but particularly circles, for their ideal power, their aesthetic beauty. Sutton has also worked with many different shapes and forms but is currently using triangles or working within the architecture of the grid. At Grey Gallery they brought together a mix of paintings and works on paper that explored the beautiful geometry of circle, square and triangle.

Circle image (left): Carol Robertson, Phases #4, 2020, 94 x 94cm, oil on canvas.
Square image (centre): Trevor Sutton, Dream 10951, 2017, 99 x 99cm, oil on canvas.
Triangle image (right): Trevor Sutton, The Shaking Tree, 2022, 66 x 76cm, oil on canvas.

Exhibition

Nathan Cash Davidson

Sphere of Clarity

9 - 20 June 2024

Venue: The Grey Gallery at 12A Vyner Street, London, E2 9DG

Grey Gallery presented Sphere of Clarity, a solo exhibition of Nathan Cash Davidson’s paintings in Vyner Street, curated by Laurence Noga. Two new works about the Russia-Ukraine war and a painting referencing the funeral of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh were shown alongside a survey of ten previously unseen paintings from the last decade.

Nathan Cash Davidson was born in London in 1988 and graduated from Wimbledon College of Art in 2010. He began to exhibit his large vivid paintings in 2007 at a squat in Peckham and thereafter with the dealer Hannah Barry. In 2010 he was the youngest artist to be given a solo exhibition at the prestigious Parasol Unit, one of the high temples of serious contemporary art in London.

Davidson uses imagery from a wide and surprising range of sources; Alan Sugar points from the television screen while Richard the III on his horse trots alongside in a neighbouring work. Characters from myth, history and news jostle for position in these set pieces, the exhilarating juxtapositions are at once confounding and mysterious. The paintings present familiar characters without judgement or hierarchy and once they are removed from context by Davidson's hand a timeless innocence descends on them as they look out from these pictures with a new detachment.

Davidson is also a rapper, the torrent of words typical of that musical genre follows through to his painting. These are intuitive pictures and the imagery comes thick and fast. These new works are Davidson's take on science fiction, the Old Masters and the war in Ukraine among other things. As the age of AI approaches, this work seems prescient and pertinent.

Image: Nathan Cash Davidson, Ukraine Modern Warfare, oil on canvas 120 x 202cm, 2023,

Exhibition

Jock McFadyen

Made in Hackney 2

11 May - 16 June 2024

Venue: The Grey Gallery, 4 Helmsley Place, London Fields, London E8 3SB

Made in Hackney 2, was a show of landscape paintings made in the artist's studio at London Fields.
Most paintings in the world are made inside, locked away from the subject, as were cave paintings 40,000 years ago. A good thing, as many of McFadyen's works measure 2 x 3 metres or more and would be impossible to cart over fields to do the plein air thing, although the pictures in this show are not huge and most are small enough to hang in a house. Canaletto also worked indoors, those gondoliers and clouds wouldn't have kept still for him. But McFadyen's pictures depict British territory, urban and pastoral, and sometimes they depict nothing much. Empty vistas and beaches hang with fleeting images of the built environment viewed from a train travelling at 100mph and others depict Scottish wilderness with a smidgen of city lights peeping in from the wings.
On this island the sea is never far away and neither is the city.

Image: Jock McFadyen, Westhaven, oil on board, 69 x 94cm, 2024

Exhibition

John Deakin, Jock McFadyen, anonymous_bosch23 & Iain Sinclair

Pariah Genius

26 April - 24 May 2024

Venue: Swedenborg House, 20-21 Bloomsbury Way, London, WC1A 2TH

Cheerio Publishing, in tandem with their April publication of the mighty Iain Sinclair’s Pariah Genius, announced a month-long takeover of the historic and beautiful Swedenborg House in Bloomsbury for an exhibition of John Deakin’s photographs, Sinclair’s notes and research for the novel, as well as paintings by Jock McFadyen, a film by anonymous_bosch23, and events and talks inspired by the great photographer’s work.

Exhibition

Tom Hunter

Life and Death in Hackney

13 April - Sun 5 May 2024

Venue: The Grey Gallery, 4 Helmsley Place, London Fields, London E8 3SB

It’s been nearly a quarter of a century since Tom Hunter made his landmark series Life and Death in Hackney, 1991 - 2001. The work depicts a world completely built over by the London Olympics and the ongoing gentrification of Hackney and adjacent areas. Life and Death in Hackney paints a landscape, creating a melancholic beauty out of the post-industrial decay where wild buddleia and sub-cultural inhabitants took root and bloomed.
To mark this passing of time and place, Tom Hunter showed seven large scale images from the series at the Grey Galley.

Image: 'The Vale of Rest' 2000, from the series 'Life and Death in Hackney', 4ft x 5ft Cibachrome print, mounted on aluminium, glazed and framed.

Exhibition

Jock McFadyen & Jem Finer

Underground

25 Nov 2023 – 18 Feb 2024

Venue: The Grey Gallery, 4 Helmsley Place, London E8 3SB

Underground, a two person show. Painter Jock McFadyen RA presented 7 large paintings with accompanying field recordings by musician Jem Finer.
The exhibition featured seven large pictures from McFadyen’s Underground series from the late 1990s. These images were culled from various London tube stations. Bank and Elephant border on pure abstraction but are pulled back by the inclusion of familiar signage and iconography. These empty, haunting works were viewed in concert with a visceral soundscape formed of edited field recordings by the musician and artist Jem Finer. Like the paintings, this piece was composed of random sound thrown up by the underground but punctuated by the familiar. Announcements, signals and even a busker draw us back to subterranean reality.

Exhibition

Jock McFadyen

Red Yellow and Blue: Five pictures

18 Mar - 14 May 2023

Venue: The Grey Gallery at Jock McFadyen Studio, 4 Helmsley Place, London E8 3SB

McFadyen opened his studio in London Fields, presenting for the first time together five recent paintings, including large-scale urban landscapes, along with figurative works.

Exhibition

Jock McFadyen

Tourist without a Guidebook

6 Feb — 11 Apr 2022

Venue: Weston Rooms, Royal Academy of Art, Piccadilly, London, W1J 0BD

Bringing together 20 works spanning almost 30 years, this free display in the Royal Academy of Arts' Weston Rooms explored Jock McFadyen’s fascination with London’s changing urban landscapes.

Further details: royalacademy.org.uk

Exhibition

Jock McFadyen Goes to The Lowry:

A Retrospective

16 Oct - 27 Feb 2022

Venue: Lowry Gallery, Pier 8, The Quays, Salford, M50 3AZ

Scottish artist, Jock McFadyen, displayed a range of works spanning 45 years.

Interview

31 Oct 2021

Stark Talk

Edi Stark talks with Jock McFadyen on BBC Radio Scotland.

Length: 36:22 minutes
Download: Stark Talk, Jock McFadyen (128kbps)

Exhibition

Jock McFadyen

Lost Boat Party

11 Jun - 25 Sep 2021

Venue: Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh

A major exhibition of over 20 large paintings at Scotland's Dovecot Studios, in partnership with The Scottish Gallery

Further details: dovecotstudios.com

In Conversation

Edi Stark Talks Art

with Jock McFadyen

12 August 2021

In this live, informal conversation, Stark delved into the consideration of landscape and environment that drives McFadyen’s work and his unique, unromanticised reflections on Scotland.

Performance

Edinburgh Fringe Opening Event

Little Sparta & Lost Boat Party

6 August 2021

To celebrate the opening of the Edinburgh Festival 2021, Little Sparta performed live their latest album Lost Boat Party.

Online Interview

Edinburgh Art Festival Launch Event

with Jock McFadyen & Simon Groom

31 July 2021

Dovecot celebrated the opening of the Edinburgh Art Festival 2021 with a live interview between artist Jock McFadyen RA and Simon Groom, Director of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Galleries of Scotland.