Leyden Gallery's forthcoming exhibition is Platform for Emerging Arts 7. This mixed media exhibition, presents a diverse group of emerging talent in one of East London's most vibrant art spaces. Leyden Gallery's seventh Platform for Emerging Arts exhibition promises a varied and powerful show of art from seven talented emerging artists.

Responding to a call-out for emerging art these seven artists have been selected for their promise and skill by Adriana Cerne & Lindsay Moran, the gallery directors and curators of the gallery’s quarterly Platform exhibitions. Leyden Gallery has shown its astute judgement in recognising emerging talent as their perception has in the past produced artists, who have gone on to both critical acclaim and commercial success.

With the development of each of Leyden Gallery’s Platform shows there is a fabulous opportunity for the public to both see and buy art from emerging artists at a critical early stage of their careers.

Participating Artists:

Allan Grainger is interested in the way people move through or inhabit a space, and how their presence impacts on or reinforces the meaning of a place. For this exhibition he creates photographic tableaux of celebrated cultural locations in Europe. He mostly works with the tableau form as he considers this to be the most effective means of constructing a visual mapping of a place.

Jake Stark explores the internal divisions and spatial relations between perception, architecture and patterns of being. Focusing upon the question of the line, Stark acknowledges it as that which can guide us when we venture into the formless, it is a way for us to recognise form and dimension. He says ‘Line may lead to something quite definitive and precise – a landscape, a human figure or it may lead to the subconscious – the land of fantasy, of which can be uninhibited with no contact with the world of reality.’

Anita Le Sech produces large-scale abstract work in a display of line, texture, and artistic vision. To create her paintings, she uses a range of materials from acrylics to oils to emulsion; she also incorporates cement, polyfilla, adhesives, wood, stones and wax to add a compelling array of textures. Le Sech’s powerful use of colour contrasts well with her delicate lines. Her work, strikes a balance between order, chaos, simplicity and complexity.

Jack Edmonds is inspired by how natural forms and processes can result in complex emergent systems, where chemical, material and ecological factors combine to create something intricate and unpredictable. Fascinated by natural sciences and the limits of our perceivable and material universe, his work attempts to make the phenomenological more tactile by way of utilising base materials in complex processes. The works presented are from a current series of paintings, ‘The Alchemist’, and are an exploration into the appropriation, fascination and metamorphoses of these minerals into precious arrangements.

Ann Petruckevitch describes herself as an alternative processes analogue photographic artist. She creates unique one-of-a-kind lumen prints by placing a variety of plant cuttings onto different types of black and white, and colour, photographic paper secured by a plain glass plate. Her practice also enables her to work with photographic emulsions to create unique analogue images on a variety of watercolour paper and even stone, such as Slate, Marble and Portland.

Pernilla Iggstrom Using source material derived from Iggstron’s personal archive of family albums, her series of paintings ‘Cultural Nomads’ explores both actual and imagined places through the concept of nature/nurture, where the relation between the past and the present, the communication between the interior and the exterior, and the connection between the physical and the psychological are key. The painting process enables her to reduce some of the overly specific imagery to something more universally accessible. While the figurative elements contain narratives, the abstracted areas in her paintings explore the emotional and psychological side of an event.

Ann Mackowski examines the function of figurative representation, her work sets out to illustrate our ability to exist in different realities, whilst developing mythological frameworks around the world we inhabit. She considers London as the perfect petri dish for her hypothesis—as an ancient and evolving city, its streets are at once in a position of physical stases and ideological irresolution. Through mixing mythology with her own subjective understanding of space, her works are at once deconstructions of the symbolic sovereignty of maps, odes to mythology, and testaments to the fundamental idiosyncrasy of reality.