Claire Reed Vidarte Spain

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Claire Reed is an English visual artist who lives between England and Barcelona, Spain, and paints in oils with a limited palette on large sheets of stone paper, combining abstract expressionism and figurative elements. She is interested in Romanesque statuary and in figures in frescoes that suddenly come into focus from beneath layers of paint or plaster, worn and tarnished by time,

I am interested in referencing and creating textures, such as marble with lines or cracks, scratched, damaged yet beautiful surfaces, where the image has rubbed away and the passage of time exposed. I mainly use pitch, oils, and wax on stone paper, as well as collage and layered pieces using butcher´s paper.

Themes include an exploration of palimpsest and layered histories; torn-apart and re-joined characters; rending, breakages, and cobbling pieces together, physically patching up broken images and imperfectly repairing damage. My work straddles the border of abstraction and figurative or narrative elements.

Experimenting with the beauty, potential, and meaning in damaged and mended objects as a metaphor for human pain and recovery led me to work with a gold leaf specialist to seal cracks in my damaged figures. However, I also work with messier and humbler materials, such as staples or string, and recently had a solo exhibition in Barcelona (Filling the cracks with Light) and a joint exhibition (Other Beauties) on these themes.

I also experiment with monoprints, using pitch or charcoal with different mediums (such as keratin, spirits, and oil mixes) to create twinned images that I embellish and differentiate, creating textured images through the printing process, including interventions at different times, which I also mark or draw into, or use mediums to remove later.

My starting point is more intuitive than conceptual, and I like working with almost indestructible stone paper that can take a lot of punishment, allowing contrasting layers and textures which are exposed at different depths.