Our Team

Artist

Peter Coffin

Peter Coffin is a conceptual artist based in New York City. After completing his studies at the University of California, he went on to receive an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University. Coffin has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at The Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC, the MoMA in New York, and Le Confort Moderne in Poitiers.

Artist

Solveig Lønmo

Solveig Lønmo is an art historian and curator at the Nordenfjeldske Kunstindustrimuseum (National Museum of Decorative Arts and Design) in Trondheim, Norway. Lønmo recently curatedThe Hannah Ryggen Triennial ‘New Land’(2019) that places the Swedish-Norwegian artist’s political tapestries in dialogue with six international contemporary artists. She also curatedThe Logic of the Local. Norwegian and Polish Contemporary Design in 2017. Before Lønmo’s institutional affiliation in 2014, she worked as a freelance writer and art critic.

Artist

Nicola Brandt

Nicola Brandt is an artist, writer and filmmaker. Her work explores innovative documentary practices in relationship to the role of memory, narrative and positionality. Her bookLandscapes Between Then and Now: Recent Histories in Southern African Photography, Video and Performance Artwill be published by Bloomsbury Press. She has presented her work internationally, including at the MAXXI Museum in Rome, Yale University, and the Würth Museum in Germany.

Artist

Frances Whorrall-Campbell

Frances Whorrall-Campbell is a writer and artist based in London. Their writing has been published by theOxonian Review,AnotherGaze, ArtevisteandArt Review Oxford, amongst others. They are currently working with Banner Repeater on their Digital Archive of Artists’ Publishing, and with the Tate Modern to develop their ‘Tate Exchange’ programme.

Artist

Lorenzo Nassimbeni

Lorenzo Nassimbeni is a South African architect and artist, based in Johannesburg and Cape Town. He works across drawing, printmaking, mural and sculpture. He has exhibited at the 54th Venice Biennale, the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale, and the New Biennial for Art and Architecture in Stockholm. He recently had a significant solo exhibition entitled ‘Polygraph’ at David Krut Projects in Johannesburg.

Artist

Johnny Abrahams

New York based artist, Johnny Abrahams, is well-respected for his exquisite attention to detail and erudite sense of balance and tension within his paintings. Abraham’s earlier optical works employed an intense additive pattern making strategy, which would act to stretch and unsettle the gaze. These were paintings full of the hustle bustle of the city his fresh oeuvre, he has succeeded in experimenting with an elegant rhythm, a fuller shape and a more formal, minimalist language. Interestingly these new paintings are derived from zooming in on the complicated patterns of these previous optical works, spotlighting fragments of these earlier illusions. By magnifying and subtracting pattern until a composition is rendered, Abrahams reveals an opportunity to celebrate the negative space both equally and simultaneously as a secondary image. The practice has gone from techno to contemplative. Appreciative of his own space, these meditative works more accurately reflect the artist’s natural character and speed whilst still satisfying his sense of meticulous work practice.

These slow, still, totemic- almost calligraphic forms fleet between their modernist simplicity and a subtle investigation into the effect of light on perception. The paint is applied with a palette knife, causing ridges to form, effecting the interplay between light and composition and inviting them tentatively in the realm between sculpture and painting. Abrahams is exhibiting works with hues of dark grey and dark blue, alongside those that he considers ‘beyond black’, slightly slowing and softening the speed at which we read the image. Whilst one cannot help being seduced by the implied movement and sculptural, almost architectural imposition of the composition, these paintings also operate on a subtler level, the softness of blurred reflection following one’s movement around the work in a quiet yet elegant fashion. Contemporary yet at the same time archaic and elemental these paintings satiate the desire for a calm contemplation whilst working on a primal visual level.


ARTIST

Daniel Crews Chubb

Daniel Crews-Chubb’s paintings combine powerful visual archetypes, familiar throughout human history; Gods, mythical characters, nudes, beasts, trees and chariots. The characters are rendered in his large-scale, mixed media works that typically incorporate drawing, collage and painting.
They embody a search for the authentic, the raw and the unrefined, and are subtly influenced by consumer culture, Modernist painting and the history of mark-making, from cave painting to expressionism and neo-expressionism.
His repetition of figurative motives becomes a vehicle for exploring the act of painting itself, utilizing a repertoire of seemingly casual marks that are, in fact, worked and reworked to create hard won, layered paintings. He uses oils, acrylics, spray paint, sand, charcoal and pastel with abandon on rough, stretched and re-stretched canvases that he often scrapes back and over-paints many times. Corrections are brutal, collaging further canvas and assorted material on top of past imagery to edit and proceed quickly, retaining spontaneity in the development of his ideas. His characters are introduced and reintroduced into the paintings, one feeding the next. Ancient gods and goddesses, mix with Yetis, and Belfie girls from Instagram -abstracted yet realist, false yet real.

Crews-Chubb’s employed methodology involves using his canvas structure like an ever-evolving collage both conceptually and physically, the architecture of which if dissected, would reveal numerous iterations, thoughts and actions that led to the final state of rest. If the artist dislikes or wants to change something it is covered with linen, clothing or whatever material is to hand, allowing him to adjust and proceed quickly. Thus, he is capable of making paintings that feel at once the product of their own layering and time worn history whilst remaining truly dynamic and gestural. So, whilst these works are ‘new’, they are also laced with both the history of their making and a patinated record of progress and recession. In this way, Crews-Chubb gives us something we crave – the new fresh and organic with a sense of time, history, patina and physical progress. This is combined with his ability to trigger displaced memory through reference to historical figurative parallels and abstracted homage to his inspiration both in terms of art and artefact.

Daniel Crews-Chubb was born in 1984 in Northampton and lives and works in London. He completed the Painters Studio Programme at Turps Art School in 2013, having previously received his BA from Chelsea College of Arts in 2009. His work is in public and private international institutions and collections including Denver Art Museum, The Bunker Art Space in West Palm Beach, The Saatchi Gallery and the Hall Foundation in New York. He has had notable exhibitions with Vigo Gallery, Saatchi Gallery, Roberts Projects and Galerist and residencies in Bali, LA, Denver and Istanbul.

Creative Director

Tim Hopkins

Tim Hopkins works as stage director, scenographer, film maker, creative director, theatre maker and creator of audio-visual projects, often exploring opera and the digital realm.

As director, commissions include productions for Opera North, ENO, The Royal Opera, WNO, Staatsoper Hannover, Munich Festspiele, Teatro Dell’Opera Roma, Theatre Basel, Bühnen Graz, Almeida Opera, Aldeburgh Festival, South Bank Centre, BBC Symphony, BBC Proms, Alternative Lyrique Paris, Glimmerglass, Wexford Festival, Dublin, BCMG, Batignano Festival, Channel 4, Aurora Orchestra, and London Sinfonietta.

Tim also makes performance pieces, often with composers, responding to themes such as architecture as social vision, scientific objects, horror fiction, the Victorian creative imagination, Russian folk performance, migration, the sound-world of WWI, and social media. His projects are often meeting points for a range of artistry in creative teams, often connecting traditional and contemporary ideas. He has worked with many composers including Lionel Bart, Luciano Berio, Harrison Birtwistle, Mira Calix, Tansy Davies, Dai Fujikura, Elena Langer, Claudia Molitor, David Sawer and Judith Weir.

Tim was awarded a NESTA Fellowship in 2001, an AHRC Fellowship in the Creative and Performing Arts in 2007, and has a Research Fellowship at the University of Sussex.

Tim and Robert Thomas are currently working on Empathy Machine, towards a participatory opera in Virtual Reality designed to address conflict.

Composer

Robert Thomas

Robert Thomas is a composer based in London UK. His work often explores the possibilities of music adapting and changing in realtime to the listeners situation.

He uses a range of techniques and approaches from conventional composition to graphic / rule based scores, adaptive systems, algorithmic, generative, stochastic composition, procedural generation and machine learning / artificial intelligence. He composes and programs bespoke experiences for each project.

Recent commissions include The Barbican, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Google, Boiler Room, the BBC, Sky and National Geographic. Robert has also collaborated with Massive Attack, Imogen Heap, Hans Zimmer, Junkie XL / Tom Holkenborg, Carl Craig, Air, Ben Burtt, Richard King, Bookashade, Jimmy Edgar, Mel Wesson, Little Boots, Chiddy Bang, Console, Sophie Barker (Zero 7) and Kirsty Hawkshaw (Opus III, Orbital, Tiesto).

Choreographer

Lynne Page

Lynne Page is a choreographer who works in Film, Tv, Music, Musicals, Plays and Opera. In 2010 she was nominated for a Tony award, a Drama Desk award and an Olivier award for her work on the West End and Broadway’s La Cage Aux Folles. In film she has worked for Warner Brothers and Working Title as a movement director and choreographer. On stage, credits include extensive work for London’s West End, the Royal National Theatre, The Royal Shakespeare Company and Broadway, where again in 2010 she had two shows playing opposite each other.