Layla Murga & Andrew Revell
Being Nature showcases a variety of new paintings, sculptures, collages, drawings and photographs all created during the year-long lockdown.
Although initially dramatic, the lockdown period became a very productive creative time for both artists free from the usual distractions and demands of contemporary life. The contained and isolated nature of the year prompted an atypical freedom allowing artworks to emerge unimpeded.
Hence the title ‘Being Nature’ describing a liberating sense of creative play and an expression of “getting out of their own way” during the active process of creation.
This is their first collaborative exhibition and their work shares an experimental look at what can result when expression and forms are free to surface.
The Artists
Layla Murga’s work explores the expressive nature of materials, form and colour in a variety of applications including painting, drawing, assemblage and textiles. The common thread presents new ways of seeing; ordinary shapes and textures suggest another realm, perpetually out of reach but surfacing in the abstract imagery derived from personal experience, everyday visual language and universality of signs and symbols. Recurring themes of recent work include the eternal qualities of geometry, ancient forms and the realm of the collective unconscious.
Born and raised in London to Italo-Spanish parents Layla studied Graphic Design at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and completed a Masters in Printed Textiles at the Royal College of Art in 2005. She has since been practising art across a variety of two dimensional mediums in addition to work as a freelance textile designer and in arts education.
Andrew Revell constructs primarily in metals or wood, often incorporating found objects or recycled material along with the new. A career of professional design, commission experience and accumulation of considerable craft skills not withstanding, the sculpture making employs the antithesis of a planned or preconceived approach and has method more in common with improvised music making, often using chance and collage.
Starting with an initial form the artworks are composed part by part, building a network of relations within space and time toward a resolution, capturing the energy of the studio moment.
The artworks are not models of the world - neither abstractions or simplifications, but new objects brought into being and although suggestive, sufficient in themselves.
Graduating from art college in Gloucestershire some 30 years ago Andrew has worked from studio groups in Bristol, Manchester and since 2008 at ACAVA studios in Acton, West London, regularly exhibiting and making commissions he is represented in the UK by Noon-Powell Fine Art.