Helen Brough’s First Solo Show Now Online

While we may not be able to visit art galleries at the moment, don’t miss the first solo show by British artist and QEST Scholar Helen Brough in the online virtual gallery of Aleph Contemporary. Entitled Lightscapes, the exhibition consists of a selection of Helen’s pastel works focusing on the complex physical properties of colour and light. For Helen, the act of pushing the pastel dust around the paper defines the path for her larger paintings in oil on aluminium. She uses analogous and complementary colours to create energy and bold contrasts with a sense of harmony and balance. 

Helen draws inspiration from paintings of the 1950s by American Abstract Expressionists Mark Rothko, Barnet Newman, Clyfford Still, characterised by large areas of more or less flat single colour.  She also looks to the Colour Field abstractions of the 1960s by Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Lewis, Kenneth Noland, which made colour relationships the chief carriers of emotional content.

She comments, “Lightscapes transcends any particular place and becomes itself both here and elsewhere at the same time, embracing the magic and the scientific, the natural and the artificial, the topological and the poetic dimensions of colour.” 

On show until 30 April 2020.