SHADOWS AND LIGHT

LEWIS BRANDER AND VIPEKSHA GUPTA

Galerie ISA is proud to welcome artists Lewis Brander and Vipeksha Gupta for a dual show titled Shadows and Light.

Distinct in their approaches and oeuvres, what unites these two young artists is an exploration of color and light. Using primarily the medium of painting, both artists’ process is multi-layered in palette, in texture and in meaning. Time is a recurring theme—works are painted over a course of several months, sometimes years or revisited after long periods—furthering a process of discovery and delineation.

Lewis Brander (b.1995, London, UK) is a landscape artist, inspired by the English Romantic painter J.M.W. Turner, 1950s American abstract artist Mark Rothko and French Impressionist Claude Monet. Like the artists he admires, Brander is dedicated in capturing the landscape and sky over day and time. He is fascinated by the effects and shifts of natural light, translating that view in the realm of abstraction, using a language wholly his own.

The starting point of this series is the sky as viewed from Brander’s East London studio window; London’s pale subtle light with its chromatic variation translated in oil paint. An outlier work is an abstract figurative painting, started in Athens, Greece (known for its vivid blue skies and bright Mediterranean sun) and finished in London. Brander’s process is meticulous, using a limited palette of impressionist pigments to achieve subtle variations in color, and building up tone in delicate layers.

Brander’s works are a meditation on the physical act of painting. He considers them visual poetry (focusing on memory and the spiritual experience of looking skyward) resulting in pieces that are both figurative and abstract. In this tension, Brander creates a liminal space, which transports the viewer to a place of feeling rather than just seeing.

Vipeksha Gupta’s (b.1989, New Delhi, India) approach appears more phenomenological, a trajectory of introspection moving outside the realms of the human body, to explore the metaphysical sphere created by our collective consciousness. Gupta, who practiced sculpture for over a decade, looks to land artists such as Michael Heizer, Richard Serra, Barnett Newman, Mary Corse and Josef Albers for their sensibilities but is equally drawn to the mysticism of India and the Far East.

Light is the premise of Gupta’s practice. Works are imbued with their own luminosity, reflecting a deep meditation into human consciousness and the power of shared experiences. Using Fabriano hot pressed paper, Gupta’s work is highly stratified, she explores concepts through graphite, charcoal and pigments, with previous layers smoothed out. Every effort, every coating, still remains visible at the end, not unlike her belief that eternity is an embroidery of experiences that come together.

The wavelength of color and its organic, intuitive representation is at the heart of Gupta’s growth as an artist and a being. In a previous series titled ‘Cerise’, Gupta showcased a particular shade of red, noticeable at dawn, to depict healing. In this body of work, she focuses on brown, with a shimmer of iridescence, reflecting a soul-searching journey; the power of skin-to-skin contact, the literal and metaphorical layers of skin (worn and shed) that make up our varying perspectives and the marriage of the mundane with the ethereal.

In both artists’ works appear the faint delineation of a line. In Brander’s paintings, these depict the horizon, a formal element that has become a trademark in recent years. While for Gupta, this line has taken on multiple forms, through folds, serving as a gradient of color and also a technique to showcase the linearity in her journey.

Priyanka R. Khanna