SUMMER EXHIBITION | CYNTHIA CORBETT GALLERY
Andy Burgess, ‘Villa Taddei’, gouache on paper, 12.7 x 17.8 cm, copyright the artist, courtesy Cynthia Corbett Gallery.
Cynthia Corbett’s Summer Exhibition – by appointment, at her Wimbledon gallery – is a vibrant affair, reflecting a love for style, glamour… and cool Modernist buildings.
We’re particularly taken by the work of two of the artists she is showing, Deborah Azzopardi and Andy Burgess (pictured).
Azzopardi is the UK’s answer to Roy Lichtenstein, with a touch of Jordi Labanda thrown in, whose alter-ego characters are fun-loving, sexually liberated femmes fatales with a penchant for red stilettos and fast, open-top sports cars.
Burgess’ work is rather more reserved, but then again, so is most everybody’s. He has a great interest in Modernist buildings, which he paints in gouache on paper, from arresting angles. These angular edifices are unpeopled, almost inviting the viewer in to look round, make themselves something on the rocks, and have a dip in the pool.
Pictured is ‘Villa Taddei’, a painting of the house of that name, situated near Florence, designed by the Brutalist architect Leonardo Savioli. This 1965 building is rendered all-the-more minimalist by Burgess’s reduced-yet-vivid palette and economic brushstrokes. The painter’s contemporary style puts the ‘modern’ into Modernist, reminding us that such architecture remains as surprising and radical as it was the year it was built.
Burgess also has a love of graphics from the ‘golden era’ of American design (1930s-50s); he collects such ephemera, deconstructs it, and re-assembles it in jazzy collages, as if Georges Braque had had a pop-art attack.
Cynthia Corbett will be showing pieces by both Azzopardi and Burgess at Stand 16 of the Fair, alongside work by other contemporary artists, including ceramicists Amy Hughes, Freya Bramble-Carter, Matt Smith and Emilie Taylor, and painters Jemima Murphy and Elaine Woo MacGregor. The Summer Exhibition is showing at her gallery until September 11.