L.L. Contemporary is pleased to announce the group exhibition “Both, Inwards and Out There,” featuring 29 works by seven postgraduate artists from the Royal College of Art in London. These pieces explore the fluid boundaries of painting, blending subjective perception with abstract sensations, ranging from playful observations to personal reflections. This exhibition marks Jan Valik’s third showcase at the gallery, while the other artists are making their debut. The gallery is very thrilled to introduce these emerging artists to North American audiences.

Feeling and intuition serve as a fundamental yet deeply real basis for these artists’ exploration in painting. Their approaches are shaped by a careful focus on the formal aspects of painting and a thoughtful examination of their personal connections to the world. At the intersection of what is sensed and felt and how these experiences are communicated, the formless and intangible begin to take shape, resulting in the emergence of patterns and structures. Regardless of whether figurative or leaning towards abstraction, these works simultaneously display and conceal in balance of both directions – within and out there: transforming one’s subjectivity with an urge or calling to formulate these sensations accurately and with honest dedication to their perceived nature. Works on display are visually layered evidence of artists’ respective search(es), individual explorations and dialogues between their own existence and the experiences which shaped them.

While gentle variations of watercolors by Felicity Nutt and playfully colored oils of Toby Rainbird are formulated through patterns, repetition and rhythm, they also talk about balance and subtleties of perception in the same measure as brushwork, precise composition and subtle humor of works by Beth Cowey and Tobias Francis. Personal or ephemeral encounters are source for both, Soryun Ahn and Yiwen Liu, resulting in Ahn’s atmospheric narrations and ephemerally organic abstraction of Liu’s paintings. And similarly, through fluctuating tensions and evocation of otherness Jan Valik’s paintings oscillate back and forth from autonomous to conjured spaces. Works of all these artists are sensitive responses to the lived complexities, in essence ungraspable and fleeting. Incomprehensible but real, incomprehensible but existing, standing right before one’s (half opened, half closed) eyes.

Painting then is the other time made visible and simultaneously hidden. Both, inwards and out there.