LOOK BOTH WAYS

Exhibition dates: 6 September - 1 October.

Open Wednesday, Thursday, Friday 2pm - 5pm & Saturday, Sunday 12pm - 5pm. Free admission.

South London artists, Daniel Preece and Henry Ward share a love of colour and both explore the boundary between abstraction and representation. Their paintings vibrate with colour in delicious and wicked combinations delighting in the paint itself.

Shop windows dissolve into geometric puzzles, memories transform into psychedelic landscapes. We’re exhibiting signature works, large and small by each artist - please join us at Curious Kudu to celebrate.

Preece paints the urban environment from vast panoramas to intimate studies of shop fronts and overlooked corners all composed in his distinct, vivid colour palette. His atmospheric paintings are devoid of people, a narrative hinted at with themes of isolation and consumerism as we’re taken on a journey through deserted city streets at day and night.

Of course we each interpret the scene differently - a celebration of the city, of colour, perhaps post apocalyptic, an escape or a moment of calm. For Preece it’s always an opportunity to explore issues of geometry and colour at the threshold of abstraction and figuration. South London often provides the inspiration from the Gasometer at Rotherhithe to the views from his studio in Deptford.

‘My intention is to encourage the viewer to consider the city differently and I hope lead them to reassess their daily surroundings with a different eye.’

Ward explores the language of paint by investigating the threshold between abstraction and representation.

A seed of inspiration will kick things off - a colour, a shape, a gesture, a memory - then the journey begins. He’ll often return to a work, painting over, adding, re-working. Over time expressive rhythms of colour and form emerge and repeat.

‘I want to make forms that feel familiar but are unnameable, forms that feel as though we might recognise them but are not “actual things”.’

Ward paints in two distinct sites, his Shed in Queens Road Peckham and his Studio in Woolwich and there is an ongoing dialogue between the way he works in these spaces. Lockdown precipitated a regular daily practice in the refuge of his Shed. This rigorous, regular practice continues to inform the larger canvases now produced in his studio - which offers the time and space to contemplate and build on the rapid and instinctive Shed Paintings.