COME SEE COMME CA - The Lowry Hotel - EXHIBITION #003 / 2021

COME SEE COMME CA at The Lowry Hotel

'THE LANDSCAPE AROUND US'

1 FIRST STREET | MANCHESTER | M15 4RP | EX DATES: 21.10.21 - 07.12.21

 

Exhibition #003/21 at The Lowry Hotel brings together two artists who take the landscape around their everyday travels as their subject matter, with two very different outcomes. The exhibition is open to all daily from 10am - 10pm. Bob in, check the exhibition out, HASHTAG #commecaart into your social media posts and let us know what your favourite artwork is!

​

SOPHIE NIXON

​

Sophie Nixon graduated with a degree in Fine Art from the University of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne before returning to Manchester and commencing a business career. In 2004, she returned to painting and gained a place at Bankley Studios in Levenshulme where she worked for 7 years before building a home studio.

 

Her paintings are inspired by her life, the conflict between her busy career and social life in Manchester and the slower pace of the time she gets to paint and travel around Europe, especially Italy where her father lives. These two sides to her are played out in the dramatically different styles of painting; vivid representations of the buildings and people that form her city scapes, capturing the essence of the sulphuric lights and blurred visions of a Manchester night to the sublimely calm, bright sunlight casting shadows on a lone building or figure. 

 

Three months prior to lockdown, Sophie commenced a residency at Comme Ca Art’s Gallery in Ancoats, responding to the almost 360 degree views, evolving cityscape and changing seasons from the 5th storey of a mill building. This process of sketching and painting in situ allowed her to use a much freer expression in her paintwork. During lockdown she became intrigued by the spaces she found on her doorstep, taking sketching trips around the empty streets of Manchester city centre and drawing the beach on trips to Anglesey and Pembrokeshire. 

 

Sophie works from life, spending time drawing and photographing the scene she will paint and prefers the medium of oil paint.

 

Whilst drawing on her life, Sophie is also inspired by other painters, primarily the works of Hopper, Lowry and Rothko and has been more recently introduced to the work of Jock McFadyen and Ben McLaughlin.

 

Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions at The Lowry Hotel with CCA, Augenweide Gallery (Muenster), The White Gallery, Novus Art Gallery, Bankley Open Studios, Chorlton Arts Festival and Sale Waterside Open. She is a founder member and co-organiser of the Sale Arts Trail.

​

STEFANIE TROW

​

Born in South Yorkshire 1982, Stefanie Trow is a British Painter. She studied at Rotherham College of Art and Salford University, graduating in 2004 in Visual Arts. She has been a practising artist since graduating, living, and working in her studio, Manchester, UK.  

Stefanie’s work centres on the human gaze – her unique compositions leave us to question what cannot be seen or what exists outside the framework. Each work is inspired from an assortment of images and sketches – found and from life - becoming starting points for Trow’s emotive paintings. The work explores themes of memory, movement, and obstruction. 

 

Intense bold colours are pulled and scraped across the canvas, creating an expressive language of their own. Trow’s brushwork gives way to movement. The paint just about holds onto the image, creating an ebb and flow of realism, taken away from us sometimes by abstraction.  Like trying to grasp a memory, parts of the paintings remain vivid, whilst others drip and slide away from us, pooling into a new reality, ready for the viewer to unearth. 

 

Stefanie’s work belongs in numerous private collections, exhibiting across the UK at prestigious galleries such as the Albemarle Gallery, London, Saul Hay Gallery and Comme Ca Gallery, Manchester. She has featured in Baaba Maal’s music video “Gilli Men” and a Boehringer Ingelheim TV advert. Most recently she has been selected for the ING Discerning Eye exhibition at Mall Galleries and elected as an associate member of MAFA (Manchester Academy of Fine Arts). 

 

About the show: 

“The pieces in this show were born from two things, lockdown walks and bringing my studio home. Working from home forced me to work smaller, bringing about a new way of working for me. I also became more connected to my surroundings during lockdown, as many of us did, focusing on the simple and overlooked corners of life. It seemed natural for me to turn to the landscape for comfort and inspiration, which had already been ignited when my first child was born in 2015. 

These works on paper stand up on their own rights, and some have also gone onto to informing much larger works. I’ve enjoyed the freedom and intimacy working small and on paper has brought me.” – Stefanie Trow. 

​

PLEASE CONTACT COMME CA ART DEALERS FOR ANY ENQUIRIES. 

 

CLAIRE TURNER | claire@commecaart.com | T: +44 (0) 161 273 5495

 

CCA GALLERY 5TH FLOOR | HOPE MILL | POLLARD STREET | ANCOATS | MANCHESTER | M4 7JA

​

​