bo lee gallery is delighted to introduce two much anticipated solo presentations by gallery artists Tomas Harker and Lindsey Bull.

Tomas Harker: Third Nature

In his new series of paintings ‘Third Nature’, Tomas Harker confronts the overlooked surrealism of contemporary life in which commonplace objects and devices are intermeshed with the untouched natural world. These are made from collages of images from varied sources, with often conflicting semiotic value systems. Sources include film screenshots, art history, iPhone photos and social media. Sources are collected for their metaphorical,symbolic or formal relationships. The subjects in this exhibition often refer to illusion. The renderings often elicit ambivalence and foreboding, or the sense that things are not as they seem.

Painting is a slowed down approach to images, both in the making but also in the meditation on what’s behind the image. In a time of hyperreal saturation within contemporary image consumption, Harker interrupts this pace and invites us to explore the nature of meaning in conditions of increasingly mediated experience. By reinterpreting histories and finding new associations that resist didactic interpretation, he invites a non-linear and subjective reading.

Lindsey Bull: Camouflage

A desire to dress up and try on another persona characterises Lindsey Bull’s band of misfits and outsiders, and in her new series Camouflage, their likeness to fashion imagery has been illuminated.

These paintings carry the sense of performance and un-reality always present in fashion shoots and magazines.

Bull is interested in this transition and slippage between personas, gender and psychologies. That her characters are absurdly overdressed for the landscape they inhabit further suggests that this is some kind of performance or private ritual.

Bull plays with this sense of something being obviously present but also hidden within this new series of paintings. Figure and landscape often blur into each other,suggestive of the figure being part of the landscape. Yet, taken out of context, camouflage becomes glaringly obvious, doing the opposite of its purpose. It reveals.