Madder Rose Gallery, Clerkenwell, London
The inaugural gallery exhibition of new works by then recent Royal College of Art graduate Rachel Kneebone.
Working solely in porcelain, Kneebone produces large scale yet delicately crafted figurative scenes drawn from ancient Greek and Roman myths in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and other classical cycles. Hybrid male and female figures are either emerging from or being consumed by plant-like tendrils, creating a writhing sprawl of contorted bodies and organic matter. Erotic yet sensual, flamboyant yet discreet; there is an inherent ambivalence in these works that delights us and continues to hold our attention. A dark and brooding sense of death and putrefaction hovers over these Bacchanalian dances, frozen as they are in this seductive and lustrous material.
Lynch Architects, holders of the Young Architects of the Year award, developed the gallery from two early Georgian houses, producing a variety of dramatic split-level spaces in a highly innovative and novel design.
