Anne James reviews the abstract and figurative work of two emerging talents

As part of its commitment to promoting contemporary arts and artists, the Sarah Wiseman Gallery works with emerging young artists, showing their work and supporting them in their careers. For this exhibition the gallery has successfully brought together work by two very different young artists, one abstract, and the other figurative.

The abstract artist, Kathryn Stevens, is showing six pieces. In each she explores the materiality of paint: how it works, moves and its physicality on the canvas, creating, as it were, its own performance! She achieves this by moving her canvases around, so that the paint can take its own direction and she may apply each layer of paint on the horizontal or the vertical. The results are beautiful, luminescent and complex, each possessing an energy that engages the fluid movement of much of the paint with at times, bold statements, formal blocks of textured colour. In Plans, she expresses quite beautifully the tension between abstraction and representation and the conflict between light and colour. Cadence, illustrated left, sings out in joyful exuberance; the colours she has used both compete and co-operate to speak of activity of towering and volcanic proportions with oases of calm contained within them. In Surge, luminescent blues crash together like waves speaking perhaps of the seascapes of Cornwall, Stevens’ home and base.

Veronica Wells’ six pictures, by contrast, draw on the influence of popular culture.

She examines and presents the female form in a series of images that seemingly portray the idealised way of life that women are encouraged to aspire to. Seemingly, as Wells cleverly questions the ‘ideal’ by the use of dense paint and rough brush strokes to ask: are these coiffed and coutured icons real people? The Shoe Fits is one of her larger pieces in which the elegant sitter reclines on a white sofa, with one leg extended in order to display one of her yellow high-heeled killer shoes, clearly to her own satisfaction. Her relaxed pose and her designer top and lace skirt appear to complete the self-absorbed and sophisticated picture. But not quite, as Wells subtly addresses the woman’s fragility by giving her clothing a transparency, allowing the naked torso that lies beneath to be clearly visible through the ephemeral trappings of sophistication and applied grandeur.

Emerging Young Artists: Kathryn Stevens and Veronica Wells
Sarah Wiseman Gallery, Oxford
Monday to Saturday until July 31