Aleph Contemporary for AccessArt

'Dreampool (Rose) II' is one of a small series of watercolours that Luxton created during the Lockdown in 2020, and has since informed two large oil paintings.The piece challenges the traditional constructs of landscape painting by omitting the horizon line, creating a feeling of floating, with the soft fuzzy pink suggesting a cloud in the sky. Luxton often deliberately evades scale to surreal effects.The globule is a recurring motif in Luxton’s work and could be understood as a liquid pool, a gemstone, or a negative space; a hole. In her Rose series, Luxton places us a little further out of our comfort zone, by giving the globule a bodily, blood red shade. But she mediates this feeling with the comforting candy floss cloud hovering above.

Hannah Luxton makes paintings inspired by the geological sublime and the late 18th Century Romantic notion that a divine order resides within raw nature.The works reach further back in time finding an emotional kinship with the implicit sense of the sublime traceable within prehistoric art.Animistic currents run through the works, hinting towards a higher spiritual dimension. Animism intimates the attribution of a living soul to inanimate objects and natural phenomena, and belief in a supernatural power that organizes and animates the material universe.As such, Luxton finds her subjects in her explorations of the remote natural world - the sun, the moon, stars, mountain tops, waterfalls, craters and ice caverns - condensing and abstracting each referent into an archetypal version of itself. Often combining the ephemeral qualities of the natural world with the authority of geometry and symmetry, her paintings slow time and elude direct interpretation. Their strong emotive core is yet fragile and fleeting and they speak an elementary, instinctual language rooted in a place of pre-rational understanding.

Hannah Luxton (b. 1986, London, UK) works from her secluded studio within Epping Forest, on the border of London and Essex, UK. She studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL (2012) and Kingston University (2009). Luxton has completed many residencies and expeditions to locations such as Louisiana,Texas, New Mexico,Arizona, California, Iceland and Mt Etna, Sicily. UK solo and group exhibitions include The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition (2021); Glass Cloud Gallery (solo, 2020); Dentons Art Prize (2019); Lumen (2019);ArthouSE1 (2019); Drawing Room Gallery (2018); Blank 100 (solo, 2018); Lily Brooke Gallery (2016);The Barbican Arts Group Trust (solo, 2016). She has exhibited internationally at Midnight Gallery, LA USA (2018); Corridor Projects, Ohio, USA (2016); Boecker Contemporary, Heidelberg Germany (2016); Galleria M, Kolkata, India (2015) and the Fljotstunga Travel Farm, Iceland (2015). Luxton’s work has received support and recognition from Camden Council (2019),The Arts Council England (2018), Betty Malcolm Scholarship, UCL (2012),The Worshipful Company of Painter-Stainers and the Lynn Foundation (2011).