Hacking the High Street: Georgia Dymock’s Solo Exhibition ‘Under our Together’
Young British painter Georgia Dymock’s lockdown experience resulted in a chapter of uninterrupted creativity. Her new solo show of human hybrid entity figures opens this week at London’s JD Malat Gallery, and plunges us into a sea of bodies conceived on computers and born on canvas, existing somewhere outside the mainframe.
In honour of International Women’s Day, it runs alongside an accompanying partnership project with the curatorial platform W1 Curates, whose motto “ART, NOT ADS” promotes the injection of art into the digital, public realm.
Georgia Dymock, Intertwined Figures with a Fan, 2021. Oil on canvas. 150 cm x 170 cm.
In true hybrid fashion and in honour of International Women's Day, Dymock’s upcoming solo show at JD Malat is being rung in with a digital installation on the mammoth outdoor screens of Flannels department store on Oxford Street in partnership with W1 Curates. A stone's throw from Oxford Circus, this strip of road is home to some of the highest concentrations of pedestrian foot traffic in all of London. The larger than life screen ‘canvas' challenges the traditional media arena, inserting contemporary art into a context normally reserved for commercial advertising.
Georgia Dymock, Intertwined Figures, 2021 at Flannels, 167 Oxford Street, London W1D 2JP.
By subverting the conventional mode of exhibition-making and implanting art into the public space, Dymock's artworks are granted room to disrupt the pace of the prosaic high street, potentially reaching individuals who may not have been able to see the work otherwise. The artwork turns into an encounter; a discovery colliding with all the real-world messiness of a bustling city street.
Georgia Dymock, Blue Figures, 2021. Oil on canvas. 170 cm x 150 cm.
The way the paintings translate onto the big screen speaks to Dymock's unique process, which starts with a digitally rendered image that she later executes in oil on canvas. She engages with a broad colour palette from the start, employing a mastery of both photoshop and physical paint mixology and, most importantly, an understanding of the bridge between the two. The intersection of realities looks like abstract figurations that have almost become amorphous, paired with backgrounds that layer the noisy grain of computational patterns with classical employment of line and perspective. The resulting canvases maintain a painterly presence but reference digital aesthetics, invariably questioning what it means to be human during the digital age.
Georgia Dymock, Figures,Seduced, 2021. Oil on canvas. 150 cm x 150 cm.
“I am interested in the ‘imperfections’ that come through the labour of the painterly process, where the paint gathers and hairs of the brush sit on the canvas.”
Georgia Dymock in her studio, 2022.
Dymock's figures are voluptuous and emotive, with their hypnotic contortions recontextualising the portrayal of surrealism as a post-contemporary, reimagined style. Vast planes of exposed skin do not feel nude, camouflaged by vibrant colour fields and a dynamic play with proportion and figural construction. Dymock has taken strong influence from Polish artist Tamara de Lempicka as well as Picasso, adding that:
The flesh that marks out the figurative elements in my paintings both sticks to and challenges the idea of a surface as a defining boundary, the bodies are ambiguous as limbs slip, twist, and fuse into one another.
Ultimately, the figures exist between the virtual and the physical and mirror our recent mass adaptation to online viewing rooms, Zoom rooms, and other digital spaces. Exemplified by the diverse landscapes they inhabit, Dymock’s artworks are just as comfortable in a white cube gallery as they are floating above the boulevard.
Under our Together is on view from 11 March through 9 April 2022 at JD Malat Gallery in London. Flannels’ digital projection is on view through 20 March. Accompanying the exhibition is an essay written by Sotheby’s Institute of Art Program Director of MA Art Business David Bellingham.
Camille Moreno
Features Co-Editor, MADE IN BED