Cob is pleased to present Under a Lilac-bleeding Star - the UK debut solo exhibition for Canadian artist Larissa Lockshin. Shifting between painting, drawing and sculpture, Larissa Lockshin’s recent practice centres around her abstracted mixed media paintings on unprimed satin. Gestural motifs such as flowers, stars and leaves are created in confectionary like bursts of abstracted colour and often completed with details such as hand carved wooden framing - adornments that are situated in a visual language reminiscent of landscape painting.
Albeit employing unusual materials and crude markings, Lockshin pays firm respect to traditional painting theory and historical predecessors as a foundation for her practice. Aiming to reconcile the difference between “high art” and “craft”, not unaware of the massive gender inequality present in art, historically up until today, Lockshin’s use of categorically feminine materials as applied to established Classical or Modernist painting theory is crucial to expose and challenge the bias that these processes are lesser in importance or value. For Under a Lilac-bleeding Star - Lockshin has incorporated new experiments to include hand-dying the satin, heightening interplay between the glittering surface and matte pigment, and hand-carved frames.
The show’s title refers to travel writer Lesley Blanch’s 1954 publication of the same name, which documented the authors life in Bulgaria at the end of the 1940s, specifically of her travels from Uzbekistan to Guatemala by way of North Africa and Siberia. At heart a nomad, she spent the greater part of her life travelling about those remote areas her books record so vividly. ‘To be born under a lilac bleeding star’ cites a traditonal Balkan saying which refers to a desire to travel to faraway countries - leaving your homeland behind in search of them. With this reference, Lockshin taps in to the experience of recalling landscapes and imbuing her ethereal compositions with a dreamlike sense of nostalgia.
Seeking to challenge the existing associations, categorisations, definitions, and language surrounding art, Larissa Lockshin emphasises objecthood over image content and her subsequent work confronts the image’s drained value in an oversaturated, digital world. The reflective substrate of her paintings - in a fabric reserved for dressmaking - allows for a dynamic and lustrous surface that interacts with the light between the the matte strokes of paint and pastel. It is this activating element, whereby the works can be viewed and experienced differently from several vantage points that drives Lockshin’s practice and challenges the notion of digital reproduction in art.
