British Art Fair 2024: Revisit our British Art Fair collection

For immediate release:

4th September 2024: Cavaliero Finn is pleased to announce that we will be exhibiting at the British Art Fair at the Saatchi Gallery later this month from 26th - 29th of September.

On show will be new works by sculptors Juliette Bigley, Alice Foxen, Simon Gaiger and Ikuko Iwamoto these are featured alongside wall work by Lavinia Gallie and Kate Sherman.

Juliette Bigley
Juliette Bigley is a sculptor who uses base and precious metals to explore how we experience our emotional and physical place in the world and how we negotiate the interface between the physical world that surrounds us and the intangible worlds of emotion, belief, thought, language and memory. Focussing particularly on lines and thresholds, Juliette's work is sculptural and often comprises groups of objects.

This latest collection of sculptures explores how things appear to fit together, and how they actually fit together, whether that is something that is visible and up front, or hidden on the inside. They investigate notions of balance, balance between forms, within forms, between metals and between the pieces themselves.

Juliette's work is highly collectable and has been acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Irish State Collections and the Goldsmiths Company Collection.

 

Alice Foxen
Alice Foxen's ceramic sculpture is formed from the memories she collects of encounters with roadside waste. These soft domestic objects, left to lean and droop in alleyways and side streets, take on a new life and character for Alice. She finds a quiet beauty in these plump forms, forms that for most people would just go unnoticed.  For Alice, the street is always in a state of flux with stuff in constant chaotic harmony.

Beginning in clay, with other materials joining in, Alice creates her sculptures using a muted palette, introducing unusual textures through 'foaming slip' and 'popping grog' inviting you the viewer to take notice of the world around you and reassess these discarded objects that hold such a fascination for her.
Cavaliero Finn will present works from Alice's Pillow Series at the fair.  Work from this has been selected for European Ceramic Context 2024, part of a triennial event for European contemporary glass and ceramics in Denmark which also takes place this month.

Alice graduated with a MA in Ceramics and Glass from the Royal College of Art in 2022. Her work in clay and other materials has taken her to residencies at the International Ceramic Research Centre in Denmark and The Vermont Studio Centre in the USA. It has also been exhibited in the British Ceramics Biennial.

Simon Gaiger
Simon Gaiger's metal sculptures are simultaneously human and landscape, narrative and abstract. They are influenced by the layers of the eclectic life he has led; a childhood in Africa and the Pacific, time spent working as a shipwright's assistant, fuelled by his interests in the sea, engineering, history and mythology.  All of this works its way into his drawings and thoughts collected over many years in the piles of black and grey sketchbooks that fill his home and studio which he shares with his family in semi-rural and rather remote, Carmarthenshire, Wales.

Working with industrial materials, redundant and left to decay on the land, Simon transforms them in such a playful way that their industrial or agricultural origins become almost invisible.

Cavaliero Finn will present two works by Simon at the fair.  His latest work Harbinger and Harbour Form, one of his first ever limited edition sculptures.

Simon's sculptures are constructed from wood and forged and welded steel, sometimes concrete. It is the energy of their forms and the universality of their themes that give them their lasting resonance.

Simon works closely on projects with architects, interior and garden designers in the UK and internationally including Studio Reed, Dan Pearson, Küchel Architects, Peter Mikic, Rui Ribeiro, Arne Maynard and Ilse Crawford.

Ikuko Iwamoto
Ikuko Iwamoto is a Japanese artist living in London, whose intricate sculptural pieces are made from finely crafted porcelain.

In a new series of works titled, "Ghosts from the Sea", Ikuko Iwamoto explores environmental concerns. Growing up near the sea in Japan, on a diet of mainly pescatarian food, these sculptures arose from Ikuko's concerns about the irreparable environmental damage caused by modern fishing practices.

Ikuko comments,"These fish are the ghosts of the sea representing those destroyed by fishing practices such as bottom trawling, those species captured by mistake and discarded and those killed by plastic waste."

Ikuko's skill and imagination have come together in this poignant work that harks back to her roots in Japan where she trained under ceramic master Asuka Tsuboi, one of the pioneering women potters to emerge in Japan in the 1970s. Before coming to London encouraged by Tsuboi to study at Camberwell and the RCA. This work is a culmination of everything we love about Ikuko's work. She creates work with sensitivity, wit, patience, incredible craftsmanship and attention to detail.

Ikuko has won numerous awards including the Ceramic Review Prize for Innovation at Ceramic Art London. Her work is in several public collections including the V&A and Manchester Art Gallery.

Kate Sherman
Kate Sherman's oil on board paintings all originate from photographs. This photographic source is important for Kate because the paintings capture a reflective notion of memory, of the emotional distance between a real landscape and a photograph, between experience and longing. It is a poignant and quiet melancholy reminiscent of the artist Edward Hopper, that is expressed both by the portrayal of sparse unpopulated landscapes containing elemental traces of man, and by her restrained palette.

 

 

Originally from the Jurassic Coast in Dorset, Kate now lives and works in Sussex. Kate's work is regularly selected for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibitions, this year two works were included in the exhibition. Kate completed a BA Hons Degree in Fine Art at Birmingham University.

Lavinia Gallie
Lavinia Gallie makes abstract work that draws on pattern and geometry to animate the canvas building colours through form and line. Lavinia uses a variety of media in her practice and in all, whether painting on canvas or paper, or in this case cloth, her colours and compositions are carefully considered as she seeks to capture a sense of poetic meaning to the work. Lavinia says 'I rarely plan a painting in advance - it is in the act of painting that I develop a pictorial idea, which may start with something as simple as a square of colour; it is only by making and doing (and un-doing) that I can find my way to something approaching a satisfactory result.'

A visit to the Anni Albers retrospective at the Tate, inspired Lavinia to experiment with cloth, using scraps of collected materials like paint, cutting, layering, stitching, adding and taking away, to create these beautifully bold abstract works. Colour is so important to Lavinia and as Anni Albers herself said 'colour, as the most relative medium in art, has innumerable faces or appearances. To study them in their respective interactions, in their interdependence, will enrich our 'seeing,' our world-and ourselves." Seeing female artists such as Albers' pursuit of anonymous form and Krasner's act of tearing and cutting for collage as a form of self expression has had such an impact on contemporary art emboldening Lavinia to experiment once or twice year into textile work. Lavinia makes only two or three cloth works a year and so we're delighted to preview this limited collection at The British Art Fair.