Fuse of Air, This Body

Unit 1 Gallery | Workshop is excited to announce Fuse of Air, This Body, the first solo exhibition of Bryan Reedy in the UK. Bryan Reedy is a fine artist working with an interdisciplinary practice that includes painting, sculpture, drawing and installation. The exhibition presents new works as well as works created whilst completing his masters degree at Slade School of Fine Art in 2018.

The title, Fuse of Air, This Body is taken from the poem Plough penned by Reedy that reflects on his fascination with our psycho-corporeal existence and its relation to the earth. His recent works are representations of the same meditation, manifest in contrasting media. Shapes flow yet indicate landscapes and body parts creating a vibration of intentional duality. Tightly stretched, precisely cut, wool felt creates a line as in a drawing but also a broader material richness that is at once graphic and sculptural. Conjuring contrasts is a consistent force in all of his works. Alabaster is honed into sensuous shapes, yet the evidence of cuts leaves an intriguing evocation of touch which in turn provide a surface for rubbings that produce a series of prints that are immediately modern and archeological in the same moment. Reedy’s large-scale, untitled paintings speak for themselves, and one hears the landscape’s lonely majesty. The shapes are not contained within the canvas but seem to push against it. There is a suggestion of flux and movement, like a film-reel caught mid-frame. A pair of small alabaster sculptures tinted in naturally occurring shades of purple provide dimensional contrast, evoking a sense of meditation and stillness. By reworking the same gestural ideas through different materials and mediums, Fuse of Air, This Body, is an exhibition which expands upon the artist’s desire of finding transcendence within the quotidian, a continuous quest of endless possibilities and manifestations.