Sun Wreck

Gallery rosenfeld is delighted to host ‘Sun Wreck’, the second solo exhibition of British artist Araminta Blue.
These large-scale, immersive oil paintings take figuration to the extreme so that they border on abstraction. Vivid light and rich colours are dispersed across the canvas through turbulent, fizzing water and sweeping figures.
‘For me these paintings are about hope, energy and colour; bursting out of shells, washed up in currents, plus air, light and warmth on skin’.
The artist explains her thoughts about this latest body of works. Certainly, in respect to her previous exhibition, the strength and brightness of colour has become bolder and filled with positivity and joy which is surely related to the wonders of new parenthood which the artist is currently experiencing to the full.
This has awakened in the artist, extremes of sensation and emotion but coupled with hope and fear.
Nature is ever-present in these works, particularly wind, water and light yet also birth and pain. Blue treats the stretched canvas like a drawing on paper: The process of making the work is left open for the viewer to embark on their own journey. The artist combines delicate, dappled brushwork with scattered, dripping and splashing paint to express transformation between calm and chaos, restraint and freedom, protection and vulnerability. Whilst embracing the wreckage of time, the paintings, through light, colour and sensation radiate transformation and hope.
Araminta Blue’s paintings have always featured space as much as gesture. There are moments of great intensity allied to other moments of extreme calm. Hands and legs appear out of gesture and abstraction.
Burne-Jones’s ‘Ophelia’ casts its shadow over the painting ‘Light Filters Through’ as a female figure lies horizontally at the top of the painting, whilst a hand reaches upwards from within a maelstrom of paint in the bottom half of the picture. However, there is never a suggestion of aping a famous previous work but more a subtle acknowledgement towards the history of art.
The largest painting on view is the triptych ‘Light and Time’ where, in contrast to the previous work, a reclining body is lying down along the bottom of the central panel, whilst on the top of the canvas a hand and what could be a long leg is reaching out to the first panel where a fading sun is casting its gaze over a hazy landscape.
The element of nature intermingled with human hands dominates the third and last part of the work. With the increased ambition of size, the artist has created a very brave and ambitious mixture between painterly gesture and empty space.
There is a palpable sense of movement and of everything being in flux in these paintings with the figures nearly always reaching upwards or downwards towards the light or away from the light . The ‘energy’ the artist speaks of is readily visible and helps to give the works their originality.
In this, only her second solo exhibition in the gallery, Blue has produced a stunning body of works which continues and expands the paintings that were in ‘Silt’, her first show. Both the freedom with which she uses space and the highly original way she has found to allow figuration to appear mysteriously out of abstraction, show an artist who is continually trying to stretch the boundaries of her practice.

Araminta Blue was born 1990 in Cyprus. She currently lives and works in London.
Blue graduated with a Master’s in painting from the Slade School of Art in 2019 and holds a BA Hons from Ruskin School of Art. She has received numerous accolades including the Artists Collecting Society Studio Prize and was shortlisted for the Chadwell Award, Derek Hill Scholarship and the Hix Award. Blue’s works have been presented in various solo and group exhibitions across the UK. Her recent works have been showcased in Christie’s and Bonhams London.
Araminta Blue is interested in how the imagined space can be used as an escape and protection from our ‘reality’, whilst at the same time it can help us view the real experience with an added clarity.
The oil paint is either diluted to act like watercolour, applied in washes, scrubbed with rags or thickened to a clay or cement-like consistency that is slicked and scratched. The canvas is treated like a drawing on paper: the process of making the work is open to the viewer in the translucent layers and visibly scrubbed out marks. The subjects weave together, emerging and dissolving into the canvas.
Colliding different uses of paint and adapting forms help to express fragmented bodily sensation. Parts of figures are seen as fragile, vulnerable, transient - pieces are missing, absorbed into the setting. Other parts are more vibrant and energetic with intense colour.
Then other areas have a sense of strength, protective armour or shell-like layers. The subjects are familiar yet unplaceable, allowing for interpretative narratives.