Landscapes of Time and Memory: Rebecca Partridge, Fernando Casasempere, Silke Weißbach, Raffael Bader, Fred Sorrell, Elena Njoabuzia Onwochei Garcia, Abigail Booth, and Peter Matthews

Fred Levine is delighted to announce its opening of a new gallery in Bruton, Somerset, and it’s inaugural exhibition. Landscapes of Time and Memory, will feature a distinguished group of international and UK-based artists, including Rebecca Partridge, Fernando Casasempere, Silke Weißbach, Raffael Bader, Fred Sorrell, Elena Njoabuzia Onwochei Garcia, Abigail Booth, and Peter Matthews.

 

Bruton, a special destination for contemporary art, is a conscious location for the gallery after operating nomadically for the past few years. Since inception in 2019, the galleries programme is committed to curating exhibitions through both solo and group contexts on topics to do with our environment, positioning a gallery in Bruton authenticates this message.

 

In Landscapes of Time and Memory, eight contemporary artists converge to explore the interplay between landscape, history, and the passage of time. This exhibition reflects the shifting relationship between the land and the stories embedded within it, questioning how the earth holds our histories, both collective and personal. Each artist offers a unique interpretation, navigating the complexities of memory, place, and the erosion of time through diverse media, perspectives, and cultural lenses.

 

The works in this exhibition invoke the rhythms of history and landscape, drawing on geological processes, historical moments, and the intimate textures of human experience. As time weaves through landscapes—whether natural, urban, or imagined—each piece reflects on the transitory nature of existence and the permanence of certain marks left behind.

 

In the exhibition, two major sculptures by Casasempere will be cited, the sculptures draw on archaeology, geology, landscape and classical and modern architecture to subvert sculptural archetypes, while speaking to urgent global ecological and social concerns through the lens of his native Chile. 

German artist Silke Weißbach will exhibit a painting titled ‘Us’, a diptych made from lichens, hyaluronic acid, mother of pearl, collagen, ink, comfort, wax, and shea butter and displays as a pastel green next to a pastel rose painting. Developed during a residency at Porthmeor Studios in St. Ives, ‘Us’ reflects the contrasts of the Cornish shoreline: boldness and fragility, exposure and protection. The diptych, made from lichens and iridescent layers of shoreline shells, embodies duality—not as opposition, but as a necessary and interwoven balance. The complementary contrast of pastel green and pastel rose speaks to the unity in dualism, where each element finds meaning only in relation to the other.

Fred Sorrell will exhibit a new painting that is a continuation that builds upon three previous works; Walking, Sitting and Standing Meditation. Sorrell explains that his new painting introduces a change of pace from his recent paired back works. Here, overlapping forms weaving through space, create gestural moments that evoke movements of the body and convey a natural feeling. Open, weaving forms then build and break rhythms. Colour operates within the structure, but is not confined by it. Through the painting process new relationships emerge, the atmosphere changes, and the work evolves away from the root of inspiration.

Rebecca Partridge works from acutely observed realist oil paintings of wildflowers at night, to large watercolours of skies — built through the application of dozens of thin washes on raw canvas, painted from memory. On first encounter, the multiplicity of these works evoke minimalism and seriality, but, on closer looking, the works imbue a romantic, felt experience. She says of her work, “I’m interested in qualities of attention and how the act of making a painting can express an attitude towards the subject. With this in mind, my intention is, in a quiet way, to translate a sense of attention and connection to our environment.” 

 

Time passes; it is a river, yet it remains elusive, though perceptible. Even light gives us a sense of it—the sky, its reflection. To get to the bottom of it, we might follow a stream through a nocturnal landscape, where elements merge into one another. Or we might wander along slopes where the day begins, and the scenery absorbs and reflects the very first rays of light. Raffael Bader believes that painting, like observing what has been painted, can expand the present by adding something new, nourished by experience.

 

Abigail Booth’s works in the exhibition draw on her predilection for exploring human psychologies as they originate in nature and embed in collective memory through the passing of time. Her works manifest from a rich material language rooted in her intimate relationships to the animal and plant world, as she unravels ideas around anxiety, loss, and preservation in the face of environmental and societal collapse.

 

 Elena Njoabuzia Onwochei-Garcia will introduce a new cut-out work which forms part of the series, Brutus, are you asleep?! The tumultuous scene of figures pulling and dragging each over the bodies of others references the idea of a “cosmic battle” which permeates historian’s descriptions of the European witch craze. The horrific absurdity of that era feels familiar today, where the world feels like a battlefield in which a struggle over morality and sense is being wrought. 

Peter Matthews recent new works are being explored on the southern coast of Hainan in China with a deepening emotional and spiritual recall to many years and layers of experiences working around the world, especially on the coast of Cornwall. Working in China has exposed the artist to lingual barriers. Matthews is immersed in the local indigenous communities which translates in exploring the paintings. A new visual language compensates for the absence of verbal communication. Materially, a wider range of found ephemera throughout the new tactile connection bridges what is absent and distant in one's inner landscape. The painter takes his shelter with him, and so the painting becomes more sensitive and essential.

 

Landscapes of Time and Memory marks an important exhibition for Fred Levine in expanding their programme to Bruton, with a meaning for the exhibition to provide an entry into the galleries Inquiry in science, landscape and our environment in both representation and spirituality. 

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