Georgia Russell: Paintings
Galerie Karsten Greve St. Moritz is very pleased to dedicate the first solo exhibition to the Scottish artist Georgia Russell. Her work has always been constructed around notions of rhythm and repetition – in both gesture and form – through which the artist, plunging herself into the minutiae of cutout, brings out the potential energy of the material. In her new work, the time is that of nature but also that of painting. Having investigated the possibilities offered by the old photographs and books, Georgia Russell is now engaged in a reflection on colour and abstraction. This turning point is marked by a return to traditional materials, such as the canvas and the paintbrush, although her artistic process, which never abandons the idea of creative destruction, remains anchored in her cutout technique. The artist’s canvases are the result of a painting challenge that starts with the choice of colours and culminates in the creation of landscapes, being based solely on intuitive memories. The stroke of the paintbrush, its direction and the rhythm of the pictorial gesture are disrupted by the direction of the scalpel cut, as well as by the contrast between empty cutout shapes and the parts of the canvas left untouched.
“Cutting out is a sort of freedom of expression. For me it’s drawing, but I draw with a scalpel.”
Georgia Russell was born in 1974 in Elgin, Scotland. In 2000 she graduated from the Royal College of Art London with a MA in printmaking. Numerous solo and group shows at internationally renowned institutions are evidence of the recognition the artist receives, among them Slash. Paper under the Knife at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, or The Book Borrowers. Contemporary Artists transforming the Book at the Bellevue Arts Museum in Washington D.C.. Her work is also to be found in important private as well as public collections, among them in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Georgia Russell lives and works in Méru, France.