ART-PRESENTATION: Phoebe Unwin-Field

Phoebe Unwin’s paintings shift between figuration and abstraction creating a personal register of images and marks: observations of reality, constructs of memory or indirect references to particular places and events. Using a variety of media, from oil and acrylic paint to pastel and graphite, Unwin creates playful and irreverent images, often imbued with a stern psychological presence.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Collezione Maramotti Archive

In “Field”, her first solo exhibition in Italy Phoebe Unwin, presents a series of new drawings and paintings. The title of the exhibition holds many different connotations. The “field” could be a landscape, but also a color field, or the field of vision. Investigating the concept of landscape and how the human figure interacts with its surroundings, Unwin uses painting to construct a delicate alternation of horizons, whose varying distances elicit different paces of observation. The layered, porous surface of her works and hazy depiction of her subjects also generate a dynamic kind of vision within each painting, and an intimate link between the works. The starting point for the entire project is the painting “Approach” (2017), which shows a suspended encounter between two people; here and there, their outlines blur into the landscape, which is thus moulded by perception. Alongside her interest in exploring perception through color, form, and combinations of the two, and in studying visual paths and emotional reactions, Unwin investigates how different tempos and rhythms can operate inside a work. Through a process that moves from abstraction to figuration, where matter becomes sign and figures swim up out of color, Unwin creates images that seem to float within an indeterminate space and time. The artist herself has said that looking at paintings is “a physical, felt experience, and, in some sense, always in the present”. Influences from art, literature, film, and private life are freely reworked here, becoming open-ended images that Unwin incorporates into her exploration of painting as a process and action. Her paintings are visual places whose possibilities are infinite; the intrinsic story of the works is neither defined nor definitive and new versions of it are constantly revealed, emerging through the viewer’s active gaze.

Info: Collezione Maramotti, Via Fratelli Cervi 66, Reggio Emilia, 14/10/18-10/3/19, Days & Hours; Thu-Fri 14:30=18:30, Sat-Sun 10:30-18:30, www.collezionemaramotti.org