Kings

Press Release

Nicelle Beauchene Gallery is pleased to present Kings, the first U.S. solo exhibition by London-based artist Jill Mason.

Staking the inexhaustible (il)logics of surrealism as a dominant point of derivation, Mason’s paintings evolve from the displacement and transformation of image and object into semifigurative compositions. These new works are immersed in non-sequitur only to extract from it, jostling and merging the codifiers of representation and abstraction.

Linking an assertive compositional rigor with the generative uncertainties of poetic intuition, each of the oil on canvas works on view encapsulates Mason’s keen attention to the formal and associative potentials of everyday objects untethered from their usual stations. Throughout, intense spatial foreshortening gathers her paintings’ elements—which span architectural fragments, celebrity hairdos, disembodied organs, and loosely anthropomorphic abstract gestures—into a condensed, mutually-informing orbit.

Abundant with wit, lyricism and understatement, the semi-private universe of Mason’s canvases is one in which themes of fame, familiarity, personality and myth unfurl primarily through inference and supposition—realizing an uncanny hybrid between still life and portraiture whose fluid meanings overflow the functional and symbolic restrictions of our surveilled world.

Jill Mason (b. 1974 in Leeds, UK) gained her BA in Fine Art from the Winchester School of Art in Southampton, UK, and her Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art from the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Her work has been presented internationally in exhibitions at The Sunday Painter, London; Jerwood Space, London; John Jones Project Space, London; Mezzanine Sadlers, London; Gallery Withspace, Beijing; Burlington House, London; La aViande Gallery, London; Nolias Gallery, London; and Royal Academy of Arts, London. Additionally, Mason’s work has been the subject of a solo exhibition in 2012 at Art First, London, and is held in the Saatchi Collection. She lives and works in London.