Lost Horizon is the first UK exhibition of American artist Natalie Westbrook, opening at OMNI in W1. Energetic, raw and powerful, these extraordinary images in spray paint, acrylic, oil and stencil allude to a spectrum of influences ranging from gestural abstraction and graffiti to printmaking and 17th century Dutch trompe l’oeil vanitas painting.
Westbrook flirts with garish colour, frenetic patterns, glaring eyes and lipsticked grins that confound the viewer whilst the flora and fauna pays homage to the gods of fertility. Westbrooks world embraces the disorientation of Lost Horizons, no ground, no boundaries, no gravity no linear perceptive. We are allowed to see the unseen in her huge bold monochrome and vibrant colour canvases.
The works in this exhibition are confrontational imaginings rejecting absolutely any preconceived limits of artistic style and offering instead emotional pitch, detachment and humour. Disturbing Images of stacked heads, smiling faces, untamed nature and primitive shapes almost defy one to understand Westbrooks dreamlike world.
“While Natalie Westbrook’s ‘Faces’ preserves the primitivism of children’s drawings, she places the elementary signifiers of a face on a contextual pedestal that’s more nuanced and formal.” Whitehot Magazine
Lost Horizon takes us on an unbridled journey through an unmapped terrain of possibilities in painting, evoking the openness and freedom of unabashed creativity. Westbrook’s rigorous material and pictorial inquiries meander through the alleyways of art history and confront the limits of what makes painting possible.
Born in Louisville, in 1980, Westbrook currently lives and works in Pittsburgh, PA, where she is a professor in painting and drawing at Carnegie Mellon University. She received her BFA from The Cooper Union, as well as a Masters of Fine Art in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University School of Art. She is co-founding editor of Lookie-Lookie, a quarterly art journal.
Lost Horizon by Natalie Westbrook opens 27 January – 25 February at OMNI, London W1. www.omnigallery.com
