Author: The Auction Collective
Published: 07 Jun 2023
Top 5 Artists | Jack Trodd
A spotlight on the top 5 next-gen artists, as recommended by those that know. This week's Top 5 list is curated by Jack Trodd, the founder of Brushes With Greatness.
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Former marketing and new business specialist Jack Trodd founded Brushes With Greatness in March 2021. Inspired by a lifelong love of art he sought to step out of the corporate world and apply his expertise to supporting artists who mirrored his ethics, passion, commitment, and enthusiasm.
BWG Gallery and Agency were established with the dual intent of offering private and commercial opportunities to emerging artists whilst advising on their practice growth, levelling issues around art world accessibility and creating equal opportunities around the acquisition of contemporary art.
During his first 18 months, Jack curated 25 commercial, public and charitable solo and group exhibitions, with BWG Gallery and independently. His curatorial focus, whilst ambitiously diverse in style, centres around encouraging interpersonal communication and sharing ideas through accessible, experiential art. He also curates independently for a number or arts organisations..
Jack has already built a dedicated community of artists, production specialists and an international base of collectors and art advisory clients. He has also recently begun training and offering opportunities to fellow emerging curators. He also volunteers with and advises several not-for-profit organisations in a curatorial capacity including charity arts organisation WIILMA, Art on a Postcard and Global Radio's Make Some Noise Foundation.
"The artists I’ve chosen for my top 5 are all very close at heart, having had the personal pleasure of curating very successful solo shows for them all (or with plans in the coming year to do so for those I haven’t), as well as having work by each of them in my collection. Behind their unique talents, they’re all exceptionally kind and hardworking artists who give everything to their passionate practices."
https://www.brusheswithgreatness.co.uk/
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Joe Grieve
"The scale and raw sensory overload that enveloped me when I laid eyes on Joe’s 2.5 x 4m painting at his grad show at City & Guild in 2021 was staggering. And it hasn’t stopped since. Grieve’s capacity to channel the power of the natural world and its phenomena through a wildly varying spectrum of abstraction, painterly techniques, rich colour and BIG paintings, is as awe inspiringly diverse as nature itself. And gives similar feelings of awe. Grieve has a large-scale solo exhibition launching August 23 in central London."
Through making landscape paintings, Grieve finds himself engaging in reveries and nostalgia from remembered landscapes and experiences. They reference actual places merging poetic rural ideals, sometimes underpinned with fragments and marks from urban angles and the sound of the city. In bringing together these elements, Grieve celebrates the unique qualities of painting, constructing illusory spaces through mark-making and strokes of colour.
https://www.brusheswithgreatness.co.uk/joegrieve
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Suhaylah Hamid
"Trinidadian British artist Suhaylah H’s ‘dreamscapes’ – as people are so fond of naming them – give the natural world a sense of aspirational, unified harmony. Her delicate weaving of oils and exceptionally complimentary colour palettes coming together in one stunning, phantasmic organism. We can pick out rich art historical influences like symbolism, ancient Eastern landscape art, medieval text, middle eastern odes to nature and much more flowing through her work in totally new ways. Suhaylah has a solo exhibition launching September 23 in central London."
Though dabbling in everything from figuration to total abstraction, Suhaylah H is consistently drawn back to landscapes as a means of exploring the connection between material and immaterial worlds. Her studies in Environmental Geography and Comparative Literature at university fuelled her obsession with the intersection of landscape and symbolism.
https://suhaylah.bigcartel.com/
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Raffael Bader
"Seemingly peaceful, sometimes tumultuous, endlessly aesthetic, it’s a delight to spend time unpicking the landscapes and reflections layered into Bader’s use of oil paint and oil stick. The titling of his paintings speak of the underlying emotional foundations in Bader’s work. He’s a believer in journeying out into the natural world to help us journey into ourselves. Each title/series exploring something very human via his paintings’ naturalistic subject focus. His international acclaim and global exhibition circuit speaks of his artwork’s ability to strike this chord with his viewers."
In Raffael Bader's paintings, which are largely characterised by landscape, he considers his view of a world full of tensions while these hold the world together. He pursues a nature that consists of structures that strive for harmony on a chaotic breeding ground; in the same way he understands us humans and our social interactions.
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Hira Gedikoglu
“Hira Gedikoglu is a currently lesser known visionary going on deeply visual voyages into realms of womanhood, folklore, material, figuration, and complex composition, underpinned by a wealth of art historical research. Her recent work focuses on the folkloric motif of the black dog: the supernatural, spectral or demonic entity that appears in stories throughout Europe, and the different forms it takes on in stories across societal and cultural borders. There is a darkly alluring nature to Gedikoglu’s ambitious layering of colour, form and material which begs deeper exploration. Gedikoglu is currently working on a large body of work for a 2024 exhibition."
Born in Adana (Turkey), Hira Gedikoglu’s work is a biographical exploration of themes such as womanhood, sisterhood, motherhood, familial dynamics and their manifestation in a personal and Turkish cultural context depicted through painting and drawing.
https://www.hiragedikoglu.com/
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James Dearlove
“I discovered Ingram Prize winner Dearlove’s eerie art in DuoVision’s group exhibition Queer as Folklore. His often dark and errie paintings offer a surreal image of man’s mark on the earth, playing with dualities of the human condition. I also feel his proclivity to imbue nature with compelling action, and the known with the unknown, taps into a disconnect with the natural world which resonates with people. Whether your conclusions are positive or negative, they’re moving and motivate reflection. Dearlove has a large solo exhibition coming to London at the end of the year.”
Dearlove’s work presents a twilit, chimerical world haunted by figures, animals and hybrids.
He is preoccupied with how humans leave a trace of their presence both as individuals and collectively on the world; the way a figure can electrify a room, the trajectory of a firework across the sky.
https://www.jamesdearlove.co.uk/
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