Concrete and Glass is an exhibition that brings together the work of three artists who have been fascinated throughout their lives by the built urban environment. Fragmented reflections, distortions and perspectives provide a diverse range of images that invite the viewer to look again at the environment that surrounds us. Concrete and glass are amongst the most dominant building materials and consequently we spend much of our lives in close proximity with materials that are quite unsympathetic to human skin and bone. Yet these materials can create environments of great beauty and intrigue. Underlying this exhibition is an exploration of urban spaces and the experience of inhabiting them.
The artists make direct responses to environments that are very personal to them. David Hepher lives and works for most of the year in Brixton and, as a landscape artist, draws on the views that fill his field of vision. To him, the form of the tower block is beautiful and absorbing, full of surfaces that are embellished with the marks of time, weather and human graffiti. Brendan Neiland is dazzled by reflective surfaces, creating images of buildings that appear to shimmer and move, like light itself. Rod Taylor's composite photographs capture a sense of the surreal. His landscapes portray a range of distorted forms and strange perspectives that combine to be both disorientating and seductive.
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