Summer Exhibition 2021

Andy Burgess is known for his renditions of modernist and mid-century architecture, panoramic cityscape paintings, and elaborate mosaic-like collages made from vintage papers and ephemera collected over many years. Burgess continually expands his artistic vocabulary by mastering various media, more recently immersing himself in photography and printmaking. In 2016, he was invited to Tandem Press, Madison, Wisconsin to collaborate with master printmakers to produce a series of images in limited editions in various media.

Tuëma Pattie (b. 1938) was born in Dublin and studied at the Belfast College of Art, the Central School of Art and Design and Morley College, London, Piers Ottey and Christopher Baker in Sussex and Robin Child in Devon.

In her days in Belfast and London, she took advantage of urban scenes as her subject matter. She then had a long period in which she took time out to have two children and to support her husband in his career. This meant it was difficult to find the time for her beloved painting, as was the case for many women in that era.

In a contemporary art world that condemns beauty as camouflage for conceptual shallowness, championing high aesthetics is nothing short of rebellion. Dutch photographerIsabelle Van Zeijl takes female beauty ideals from the past, and sabotages them in the context of today. Van Zeijl aestheticises contemporary beauty in her work to visually discuss art historical links and a new way of seeing female beauty. Her work is both timeless, universal and uniquely placed in the art historical canon while offering the female gaze.

Van Zeijl is invested in her images. By using subjects that intrigue and evoke emotion, she reinvents herself over and over and has created a body of work to illustrate these autobiographical narratives. Her work takes from all she experiences in life - she is both model, creator, object and subject. Going beyond the realm of individual expression, so common in the genre of self-portraiture, she strives to be both universal and timeless, with a subtle political hint.

Isabelle Van Zeijl has shown work continuously and internationally over the past fifteen years, represented by galleries located in The UK, USA, The Netherlands, Belgium, and exhibiting at emerging and established international art fairs in New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, London, Germany, Belgium, Sweden and Italy. She was nominated for the Prix De La Photographie Paris, and The Fine Art Photography Awards. She was also one of the winners of The Young Masters Emerging Women Art Prize, London. Her work is held in private & public collections in the USA, UK, Belgium, Germany, France and The Netherlands.

Highly acclaimed French painter Anne Françoise Couloumy, Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, has been named 'La Hopper Française' by the French press. 

A student of Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, she has exhibited in France since 1994 with great success. Mentored by XX century French painter Boris Taslitzky, whose paintings are in the Tate Gallery's collection, she has a unique pedigree. In contrast to Kamps – French by nationality and Northern European in her use and sense of light – Couloumy paints as if she spent her life on the foggy banks of Amsterdam' canals. The intimacy and the serene silence of Couloumy's quiet paintings are reminiscent of Hammershøi and Vermeer. Nonetheless, Couloumy doesn't fit in any particular school of painting and her work is timeless, classical and contemporary. There is an air of mystery that surrounds her work, which suits the artist as she has little time for explanation and analysis. A Couloumy painting is much more than just a painting, it is a reflection of life.

Ru Knox is an English artist who had an extensive classical training at one of the most prestigious ateliers in the world. He has spent years as a professional classical portraitist, fulfilling private commissions and exhibiting both in the UK and abroad and he has had much success in international competitions. He is currently exhibiting in London galleries whilst working towards an MA in Fine Art at City and Guilds. Ru combines rigorous formal structure with his own original ideas, displaying his unique and personal style. His abstract works have developed from pure traditional representation to a more contemporary approach but retain references to his extensive classical training at one of the most prestigious ateliers in the world. Ru’s raw imagery renders a deeply sculptural yet intangible quality especially when his work is viewed in ‘real-life’. These processes achieve both a synergy and a tension between fine intricate draughtsmanship and sheer abstraction, forming a dynamic and lifting conversation between creator and spectator. His large paintings hang poised between a spatial world of depth and form populated with suggested characters that hint at untold narratives that have an immediate confrontation with the raw materiality of painting. The paint has been blended and scrubbed in some areas, left to trickle and bleed in others, built up and scraped back again laboriously, in forceful pursuit of the final effect.