Dreamland

04.07 – 04.08.2018

A solo exhibition by Kirsten Beets

“I am a big fan of daydreaming. I try to let my imagination run wild. Where else can you be completely free but in your own mind?” – Kirsten Beets, 2018

Dreamland is Kirsten Beets’ fourth solo exhibition at Salon Ninety One. Her ongoing investigation into human relationships with spaces of leisure imaginatively comments on the distancing between people and the wildness of the natural world. She playfully depicts tigers and deer in images of parks and topiaries and inserts a wry humour into her scenes of swimmers and sunbathers on flat picture planes of blue, pink and green.

Throughout her series, Beets delights in constructing safe moments of viewing and dreaming. The works are characterised by the overall feeling of a summer lethargy, which she uses to enable the sense of ‘dreamy versions of a real place.’ What Beets seems to suggest by way of her imaginative Dreamland is the possibility that a taming of place, plant and species in human leisure spaces has done little to suppress the wildness in human nature. It is in the daydreams of the artist that we are able to entertain this idea.

Included for the first time on exhibition are watercolour monotypes and ceramic sculptures. Prescribed by a playful and loose approach to the medium these works further the narrative of dreamland by being moments of intuitive creation that mirror the act of surrendering to dreaming. Her monotypes succeed in disrupting the photorealism of her oil paintings with a dream-like use of a Technicolor palette and loose marks. Her ceramic works populate the gallery like the imaginative elements in her paintings. While the majority of her oil paintings continue to play with the figure verses ground relationship, her watercolour monotypes realise a hazy sense of a reality seen through a sleep-laden memory of place.

Dreamland surprises and delights the viewer with imaginative interjections into ordinary life making the everyday a little more remarkable. Beets’ choice of subjects, medium and use of colour provokes a playful comment on spaces of leisure and an amusing look at the assumption of tameness within contemporary society.

ARTWORKS:

ORIGINALS