Art First

Events at Art First

• Alex Lowery at Art First

  Art

  21 Feb 2012 to 23 Mar 2012

  Dorset's West Bay and the neighbouring island of Portland have become leitmotifs in Lowery's practice. The marine light which is pervasive in all his work suggests the sea, while describing the forms that exist for the most part at its edge; the piers and jetties, ware­houses, seafront houses, cliffs, shingle, concrete sea breakers, and even an airport runway on Portland. With the elegance and silence of modernist design, he composes still lives from light industrial subjects to create a distinctive beauty, empty of human form but largely focused on what is man-made.

• Chris Appleby at Art First

  Art

  11 Jan 2012 to 18 Feb 2012

  In the catalogue which accompanies this exhibition (published by Churchill College, Cambridge) fellow artist from Royal College of Art days and now Keeper of the Royal Academy, Eileen Cooper, points out that it is obvious to any artist that Appleby has a great 'touch'. From the start he was interested in stories, plays and theatre, and over the decades he has developed a personal mythology relating to 'life in the City'. His dramatis personae include Lilith, Peter Quince, a lieutenant, a unicorn, a princess and so on, with sources that range from Shakespeare and the radical intellectuals of renaissance England, to film noir. Inscribed words sometimes accompany the narratives, and he uses clay slip, silver leaf and other materials to create alluring surfaces.