Vanessa Jackson. Rough Cut and Faceted

Marcelle Joseph Projects proudly presents Rough Cut and Faceted, a solo exhibition of new work by British artist Vanessa Jackson. Jackson’s work employs geometry, determined by the experience of architecture, art history and dance, to animate the contradiction of desiring three-dimensional space in the flatness of modernist painting. Her optical play of saturated colour and light explores the possibility of fully realized space at once pertaining to logic and completeness with that of uncertainty and unease. With no overt desire for self-expression or narrative, Jackson has firmly rooted her paintings in the present, creating a space for the viewer to dwell, both physically and psychologically, within the confines of the canvas. The seductiveness of these new works by Vanessa Jackson draw the viewer in, offering an immersive experience as well as a space for reflection.

After 35 years of regular teaching, mentoring many of today’s artists, Jackson has quit academe to concentrate all her energy into the studio. Now harking back to Jackson’s own undergraduate dissertation, she used a Wittgenstein quotation as its title, which encapsulates Jackson’s abstract practice.

‘What finds its reflection in language, language cannot represent. What expresses itself in language, we cannot express by means of language. What can be shown, cannot be said.’

Born in 1953 in the UK, Vanessa Jackson has been living and working in London since 1971, the year she embarked upon her fine art education in the capital, graduating from St Martins School of Art (BA) and the Royal College of Art (MA). Throughout Jackson’s entire career as an artist up until 2013, she has been one of London’s leading tutors of fine art, having taught at the Royal Academy Schools from 1998 to 2013, the Royal College of Art from 1993 to 2007 and the Winchester School of Art from 1979 to 1997 where she was made Head of Painting in 1988.

Her work has been exhibited extensively throughout the UK and internationally, including solo exhibitions starting with the Air Gallery in London in 1981 and more recently at Studio 1.1 Gallery in 2012, a wall painting at the CPG Café Gallery, London in 2010, and Sadler’s Well Theatre, London with Vertigo in Three Parts, a 10 metre wall painting commissioned in 2008 by Sacha Craddock.

Selected group shows include 2Q13: Women Artists, Women Collectors, Marcelle Joseph Projects at Lloyds Club, London (2013); Throwing Shapes (curated by Rebecca Geldard), Coleman Gallery, London (2010); Warped, Painting and the Feminine, Angel Row, Nottingham (2001); Eliminate the Negative, Gasworks, London (1998); Whitechapel Open, Whitechapel Gallery, London (1994); The Drawing Centre, New York (1986); Hayward Annual Drawing Exhibition, London (1982); and New Contemporaries, London (1974/75/76). Jackson’s work can be found in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum (Print Collection), London; Imperial College, London; and J.P. Getty Museum, USA among others. Jackson was the Abbey Fellow at the British School at Rome in 1995, undertook Yaddo residencies in 1985 and 1991 in the US, and was a prizewinner of the John Moores Painting Biennale in 1994.

84 Hatton Garden is a temporary art exhibition space managed and curated by Marcelle Joseph Projects and sponsored by the House of Kipp. This building will be demolished and converted into luxury flats in January 2015. Nearest tube stations are Farringdon (3 minute walk) and Chancery Lane (5 minute walk). Riffing on the history of Hatton Garden as London’s diamond district since medieval times, the inaugural exhibition in this space has been titled Rough Cut and Faceted.