TM Lighting is pleased to collaborate with Aleph Contemporary to show a series of exhibitions supporting artists. We are pleased to continue our art programme online by featuring exhibitions and contemporary artists from the London gallery, many of whom will show virtual solo exhibitions.
From 1st April, visit Aleph Contemporary’s Viewing Room to view their first solo exhibition with Dan Coombs:
UNFOLDING MAN
1st April – 15th April 2020.
“The reality of human interaction occurs at a level below language. I’m interested in the way people relate, penetrate and transform each other’s consciousness and I’m trying to show the figure as part of a total matrix of other figures.” Dan Coombs
Artist Spotlight: British figurative painter, Dan Coombs
Coombs (b. 1971) holds his MA, Painting, Royal College of Art, London and BA, Ruskin School, Oxford University. The artist is the recipient of various awards and honours including the Mark Rothko Foundation Travel Award, 2004 and the Rome Scholar in Painting Award, British School in Rome, and the St. Peter’s Church Commission, Brighton, 2000.
Overview by Rosa J Betrand, Curator, Writer & Historian, New York, USA, courtesy Aleph Contemporary
Daniel Coombs’ light infused pictorial spaces are simultaneously joyful and mysterious. Illuminated abstracted landscapes are populated by nude figures and the artist’s sensual and cerebral paintings may be considered a contemporary evocation of the long-standing tradition of depicting nudes in landscape ⎯ a subject favoured by artists such as Titian and Poussin, and most famously Paul Cézanne.
And yet, Coombs’ work expresses in part something not quite visible but deeply poignant, described as “The reality of human interaction that occurs at a level below language. I’m interested in the way people relate, penetrate and transform each other’s consciousness and I’m trying to show the figure as part of a total matrix of other figures.”
In terms of formal influence, the artist points to an affinity for the work of Georg Baselitz and Philip Guston, and a particular admiration for German modern artistic practice, noting these painters’ tendency to fuse figuration and abstraction. Further still, in Coombs’ energetically vivid compositions we see traces of harmonious use of hue, structure and figuration. This approach is reminiscent of the poetic conceptions of landscape and figuration found in Cézanne’s bather paintings particularly the use of lilting trees, elongated choreographed nudes now in Coombs’ pictures intersected by swathes of colour and areas of veiling and erasure, obliterating narrative and representation. The result is a series of powerful contemporary paintings that balance the sensual pleasure of paint, landscape and the canonical nude with a more cerebral study of intertextuality.
TM Lighting is pleased to support artists through hosting collaborative exhibitions and sharing artist profiles and interviews as part of an annual art programme. For more information please email marketing@tmlighting.com