Taking its title from critic John Ruskin’s third volume of Modern Painters Lex Thomas’ latest series of paintings linger on the Romantic sublime and quote from a historical obsession with the End of the World. Whilst these works reference the essence of the sublime they also suggest that perhaps modern Man has conquered all of nature apart from his own. With a Utopian quest fuelled by a para-religious pursuit of technological advancement perhaps it is the machines that will win.

Lex Thomas continues to explore the fictions man has created in order to deal with his existential predicament and the attempt to fill, as Jung described it, ‘the God-shaped hole’. These timeless landscapes are silent and menacing with mysterious crystalline growths. Devoid of human presence yet witnessed by surveillance cameras, the only company in this desolation is a space ship or homing beacon. The glitches in the representation of the skies seem to betray the unreliability of reality. Located simultaneously between Romanticism and science fiction Thomas’ paintings describe unstable worlds that fuse past, present and future.

Lex Thomas (b. London 1972) gained a BA degree in Social Science at the University of Greenwich before studying Fine Art for three years at the University of the West of England followed by a Postgraduate Diploma at Chelsea Collage of Art. Since then she has exhibited in Europe and the States and widely throughout the UK including at the Royal Academy of Art’s Summer Exhibition, the Mall Galleries and Orleans House Gallery. She has been shortlisted for the Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize, the Rising Stars Prize and won third place at the Woolgather Art Prize. She has work in private collections in the UK, USA and Germany.

Opus Fine Art
Sheep Street, Stow on the Wold
Gloucestershire GL54 1AA United Kingdom
Ph. +44 (0)14 51870827

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From 10am to 4pm