Art Düsseldorf - Lydia Blakeley Showroom

Tube Gallery is delighted to announce our participation in the upcoming art fair, Art Düsseldorf. We will be part of the curatorial program, Tales of Transformation, that explores themes of the environment -its beauty, brutality, and mysticism- and will showcase the works of British artist Lydia Blakeley.

Lydia Blakeley (b. 1980, Bracknell, UK) lives and works in Yorkshire, UK. She obtained an MFA Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2019. Blakeley’s technique involves tightly cropped compositions, beginning with a pink underpainting followed by chalk pastel sketches, washes of color, and detailed refinements. This consistent process results in a polished, even surface and a detached, deadpan gaze that mirrors her commentary on aspirational culture. Her work reflects the curated self-presentation that defines contemporary culture. Social media often promotes images that appear authentic but are carefully crafted to align with trends, showcasing status or desirability. Through painting, Blakeley slows down this fast-paced phenomenon, freezing fleeting memes and aspirational moments, offering viewers a chance to reflect on the visual overload of modern life.

This series of paintings engages with the exploration of speculative realities, I am interested in the creation of new narratives or alternate timelines to express the contemporary, negotiating the seam between reality and fiction. In a culture of technology within the genre of realism there is the potential for constructed fictions. Caught up in a tide of uncertainty and throughout periods of lockdown and isolation, I have been looking at landscapes and spaces through cameras and screens and have cultivated a disembodied and distanced way of looking at the world. I am concerned with the creation of surface worlds to mentally exist in, a desire of aspiration and for escape. The paintings explore notions of worldbuilding, investigating speculative realities and constructed environments. The relevance of painting in the present is that, within a fast-paced world, the heterogeneous nature of the medium holds a space for contemplation. In an attention economy, the temporal layers and accumulation of actions hold time, moving beyond its limitations.

The sources of these seemingly idyllic landscapes of this series are loosely based on images found online, including holiday lets, real estate listings, and private gardens, mainly located in the American West. Behind the appealing and radiant horticultural aesthetic of the man-made landscapes, the geographical regions face significant environmental challenges, including drought, wildfires, and climate change impacts, with water scarcity and rising temperatures being major concerns. In California, a 1500 square foot lawn can require anywhere from 20,000 to 60,000 gallons of water per year, depending on location and climate. The series of paintings refers to aspiration and escape, but also to the changing role of drought-tolerant plants and succulents in arid conditions and a drying climate and the importance of water conservation. With the real long-term shifts in weather patterns and warming of the earth’s climate, record- breaking higher temperatures due to anthropogenic climate change, the cultivation of climate-adaptable plants promotes a sustainable mode of horticulture. Modes of xeriscaping take form within this series of paintings, prioritising slow-growing and enduring specimens alongside architectural structures, captured in a moment through the medium of paint, a living landscape made static, devoid of the presence of people within the painting, offering a space of escape and tranquility for the viewer in an increasingly unstable world.