A_Place Gallery is pleased to present Scaffold, a solo exhibition by Gabrielle Lockwood Estrin.
Gabrielle Lockwood Estrin’s work is interested in how what is internal becomes visibly external. A perennial question in art, Lockwood Estrin asks this question much more feverishly with works that burst with shape, colour, texture and vitality. Sitting somewhere in the grey area between painting and collage, these works are constructed from paper, the reconstituted remains of painting and printmaking processes, which are then assembled into three-dimensional constructions consisting mainly of narrow cuboids. Some hollow, others filled with plaster, these bars appear to be fragile and temporary, but as structures are actually remarkably sturdy and rigid, making us question our perception of their material qualities and our pre-conceived ideas of what constitutes stability. This is an important concern for the artist - to consider what is strength, and what is its relationship to flexibility and openness.
The way the artist constructs these objects allows for an inexhaustible exercise in looking. Each individual strut becomes a painting or composition within its own right; proportion, line, colour and shape found in the micro and the macro. Each individual painting then intersects and responds to a complex framework of many other such paintings, punctuated occasionally by moments of more conventional collaged artworks embedded in the whole. All the while this entire dance of colour and form is taking place in three-dimensions, suspending itself in surprising ways, creating further relationships between background and foreground, changing constantly as the viewing angle is altered. These are optimistic artworks full of visual delight.
Lockwood Estrin could also be seen playing with notions of the grid and geometric abstraction - a common pre-occupation of modernist painting. But as ‘expanded paintings’, they extend into a life beyond the clean edges of that tradition and become something even more immediate. Painting in the ‘expanded field’ has been a theme since the phrase was mooted by Rosalind Krauss in 1979 in relation to sculpture. But in Lockwood Estrin’s work, perhaps the more appropriate term is ‘exploded’. The internal world of the artist and the internal structures of painting are pushed outward, displayed more openly than painting on a flat surface, which plays with the secrecy of layers and sits at a certain remove from the viewer. Instead, Lockwood Estrin invites the viewer to get into the guts of the object and have a good look around. The abstract world of emotion, thoughts and feelings married appropriately to the body in which they are ultimately contained. Here, the artist has laid bare the internal organs of painting itself.
Gabrielle Lockwood Estrin (born 1987, UK) is an artist based in Glasgow. She completed her postgraduate studies at the Royal Drawing School (2013-14) and BA (Hons) in Painting and Printmaking at the Glasgow School of Art (2006-10) with a semester at Instituto Superior de Arte, Havana, Cuba.
Selected solo exhibitions include: Mapping the Parts, Mono8 Gallery, Manila, Philippines (2023), Climbing Plainly Through, Hereford College of Art, UK (2014), And the dog confirmed everything, Staats Galerie Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin, Germany (2012), The Interacting Situation, The Highgate Literary and Scientific Institution, London, UK (2011)
Selected group exhibitions include: Hand Over, South Block Gallery, Glasgow, UK (2024), Rupture, Rapture: Womxn in Collage,16NSt, Glasgow, UK (2023), Not within or beyond, Mono8 Gallery, Manila, Philippines (2022), Marching Through the Fields, Warbling Collective, London, UK (2018), Evidence, RKB Burt Gallery, London, UK (2015) With a Bucket and a Mountain, Studio Warehouse, Glasgow, UK (2013), Salon Art Prize 2012, Matt Roberts Gallery, London, UK (2012), Leistungs-schau, Kunsthalle am Hamburger Platz, Germany (2011) 
Selected artist residencies include: Assembly House, Leeds (2024), Rupture, Rapture: Womxn in Collage Residency, 16NSt hosted by Patricia Fleming Gallery, Glasgow (2023), Mono8 Gallery, Manila, Philippines (2023), Women’s Studio Workshop, New York, USA (2020), Dumfries House, Scotland (2019), Printmaking Fellowship at City and Guilds of London Art School (2015-17), Scuola Internazionale Di Grafica, Venice (2016), Unpack Artist Residency, Havana, Cuba (2016)

16 - 30 August 2024
Preview Friday 16 August, 6 - 9PM - all welcome

Opening hours: Tues & Thurs 11 - 2, Sun 2 - 4 & by appointment
A_Place, 209 Bath Street, Glasgow, G2 4HZ

“A breath”, 46x66 cm, folded drawing and monoprint on paper, plaster, pigment, 2024

“Sinking between” 60x50x12 cm, folded drawing and monoprint on paper, plaster, pigment, 2024

“A Mask”, 27x25x12 cm, oil paint, folded drawings and monoprint on paper, 2024

“Entangled”, 64x59x21 cm, oil paint on folded monoprint on paper, 2024

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