Huxley-Parlour are delighted to announce a brand new exhibition of works by Catherine Repko. Duets, introduced at our Swallow Road gallery, will showcase a collection of ten new large-scale work that concentrate on the interconnection of two figures. Current at a threshold, the artist’s topics are concurrently tender and passive, as Repko weaves an ambiguity into her canvases by an abstraction of house.
The exhibition title – Duets – is suggestive of a synchronicity, a efficiency or melodic coupling, but by definition can solely be achieved by two separate people. This duality is a degree of departure for Repko’s new physique of labor, exploring the boundaries of togetherness and divergence. Within the biggest information two figures fall in step, their outstretched fingers echoing each other’s, as if beckoning an unseen presence, whereas in constellations a determine cloaked in inky blues turns away from their companion, the slight tilting of their head making a pointed gesture to a shared tenderness.
There’s a heightened restlessness to the themes of this new physique of labor: fingers level, knees are bent in movement, torsos contort themselves. The animation of the figures lends the work a temporal high quality; Repko captures her topics in transition between that which has come earlier than and that which lies forward. Umbras forged outlines that envelop Repko’s figures, making a liminality between topic and background. The artist’s formal experimentation extends the sense of fluidity: planes of color oscillate between opacity and translucence providing an ambiguity of depth and perspective, between the tangible and the ephemeral; densely layered swathes of oil juxtapose extra gestural, luminous mark-making.
The sequence is ruptured by amid the plains, providing a counterpoint with its single determine rendered in opposition to a shallow background of burnt yellows and earthy tones. Trying over her shoulder, she seems to have interaction with a spectral presence past the bounds of the canvas. The paradox of this caught second destabilises a prescribed narrative and affords various realities, introducing the suggestion that the dyads are figments. The figures in Duets might be understood, on this context, as a number of variations of this one solo topic. Repko centres the psychology of her topics, inviting an introspection and an exploration of the house between the figures and the abstracted world they inhabit. Duets examines a shared expertise that exists inside the slippages between connection and distance.
