Four women artists are set to let their paintings do the talking in the group exhibition Untitled.
The exhibition, opening Friday at Beat Pazar in Limassol, will feature work by Sheila Raven, Kelly Norman, Katie Sabry and Julie Menelaou – all born in the UK. The collection of work includes landscape paintings and drawings and also work with a fantasy and a surreal dimension.
Raven graduated from UCA in London with a BA in Painting. She has exhibited in various group exhibitions and won a European award in 2005. Her work was featured in the Discover Art magazine in 2015 and is in the homes of collectors in the UK, USA, Hong Kong, Armenia, Poland and Cyprus.
Talking about her main sources of inspiration, she said they come mainly from mortality, light and colour which she finds within the landscape and then translates into her own personal vision.
Continuing to talk about her work, she said “my need for muscularity and delicacy is an ongoing challenge and working with mixed media helps me to find a balance between the two, creating a tangible tension.”
Norman became a resident artist at the Cable Street Studios in London after completing visual studies at the University of Portsmouth. She continued her studies here in Cyprus, in Fine Art at The Cyprus College of Art under the tuition of the late Stass Paraskos.
She worked at Tate Modern Gallery and then in Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. Her work has been exhibited in group exhibitions here and in the UK and last year her work was selected for the seventh Mixed Media Exhibition at the Lessedra Gallery in Sofia, Bulgaria. She is currently working towards her fourth solo exhibition, which is scheduled for November.
Speaking about her works in Untitled, she said they are charcoal drawings based on air “exploring natural patterns in the fields and hills where I live in Pentakomo. Focusing on mark making, line and tone, my intention is to abstract these drawings and rework as paintings homogenising the two mediums.”
Sabry, who grew up in Kyrenia, studied at the York School of Art, the Rome Academy of Fine Art and the Luciana Notturni School of Mosaic Art in Italy. She works in watercolour, oils, pastels and mixed media mosaics, and has exhibited her work in Cyprus and abroad since 1982.
Her dragon series of paintings in this collection takes viewers on a journey through her dreams, her love of fairy tales and “belief that magic and magical creatures are all around us; if you sit still, look and listen.”
She started on the watercolour paintings in Untitled in January 2015, inspired by a large painting in Saint Hilarion castle. Talking about her first piece that came out of that inspiration, Sabry said “when I finished the picture, and stepped back, I realised that the entire mountain was like a dragon, which reminded me of how, ever since childhood, I had felt that Cyprus was full of strange hills that resembled large reptiles’ backs.”
Menelaou has lived and worked in Cyprus since graduating from Amersham College of Art & Design Buckinghamshire. She has worked as a graphic designer and teaches art to children and adults from her studio in Limassol. Her Human Deer illustrations were featured in London’s Rockland Literature magazine in 2016. She has sold works in the UK and Cyprus and has participated in group exhibitions in both countries. She is currently working towards her first solo exhibition to be held in September.
Talking about her illustrations in this collection, Menelaou said that human deer are portrayed “through a journey of lines that run-in ink, in and out from the mind in a sort of suspended animation.”
Untitled
Group exhibition. Opens March 17 at 7.30pm until April 24. Beat Pazar, Chatziloizi Michailide 20, Limassol. Monday-Sunday: 10am-12.30pm and 4pm-9pm. Tel: 25-355325
