Anne James studies the latest works of Magdalen Road artists

This is an exhibition which serves to celebrate the energy, synergy and talent of 18 of the artists working out of the Magdalen Road Studios. And it provides an opportunity to see a wide range of subject matter and media displayed in the quirky, delightful, intimate space that is the 03 Gallery.

I describe here work by four of these artists.

Les McMinn is showing one of three works in his series Still Life – Variations on a theme of Orange. The piece explores what happens to form and colour when both are abstracted and moved from three dimensions into two. Working with Seville oranges, he has deconstructed their form and colours. This process has effected changes in the shapes, from round to rectangular, in the colour, by widening the spectrum, and overall by developing the interconnection of these deconstructions via linear movement of paint and brush strokes across the canvas.

Families and family experien-ces and histories inform and inspire a substantial amount of the work. As in Marie Darkins’ delicate porcelain sculpture Family, made up of six gentle little figures, the curves and lines of each of them speak of protect-ive love and of a shared security.

Tom de Freston’s work explores death, memory and how memory can be censored. He is showing works drawn from a series of eight pieces he made in response to his father’s death last year. He has used canvases on which his father had painted, covering his father’s originals with his own abstract movements in greys, yellows and potent greens.

Sonia Boue’s current work is marking the 75th anniversary of the 1939 retreat ~ La Retirada ~ of half a million Spanish Republican refugees fleeing from Franco’s dictatorship. Amongst them were Boue’s grandparents and her father, then a small boy. In piecing together the fragments of information that remain Boue has been helped enormously by the contemporary photographs of Robert Capa, who recorded everyday life in the internment camp in which they were held in his Hill in the Sand series. She has used these and other memories to make pieces with a fragile semblance of coherence and stability.

In Refugee Stack with Typewriter assemblage 2014, she uses the suitcases and blankets that featured large in the refugees’ lives. These form the bulk of the piece piled up, tidy and orderly, but also in readiness for any necessary sudden departure. The typewriter in the piece is the same model that Boue’s father used to write his play Tierra Cautiva (Captive Land). And the handbag is evocative of Boue’s grandmother, who is at the heart of this work. The small boy doll balanced on the typewriter makes a reference to a photograph of a little boy taken by Capa, whose protective family have attempted to create a home for him by rigging up a blanket to provide a shield and an attempt at a modicum of family space and privacy.

New work from OX4 2014
03 Gallery, Oxford
March 18-23