Lucy Boyle / Benjamin Bridges / Lindsey Bull / Luci Eyers
Stephen Harwood / Daisy Richardson / Isaac Willis
9 – 24 March 2013
Preview: Friday 8 March 6-9pm
Gallery Open: Fri – Sun 12-6pm
The visionary tendencies and post-modern fantasies of contemporary painting are examined in this show that takes its title from Alan Garner’s dark novel for young adults written in 1967.
In 2011, The Dark Monarch exhibition at Tate St Ives outlined a lineage of British art that takes its inspiration from a particular type of mysticism that has its roots in our collective Gothic imagination. Co-curator, Michael Bracewell, in his introduction to the exhibition explained 
how the 20th century was marked by new developments in technology and mass media, but that Monarch was interested in tracking ‘the shadow of that century’, signposting various relationships between modernism and the occult.
Bracewell asserted that no matter how much technology accelerates, there will always be an aspect of art making ‘which will want to look at the mysterious, the enigmatic and that which cannot be explained.’
The Owl Service pays homage and honours these propositions, focusing on a selection of contemporary painters who play with the metaphysical myths and magic of painting’s alchemical template, unleashing more ghosts from the machine.
Transition Gallery Unit 25a Regent Studios, 8 Andrews Road, London E8 4QN
