KYLE BARNES

Northern Irish born Painter, Kyle Barnes is currently based in Southampton, England. Barnes has won the Towry prize at the National Open Art Competition and exhibited at the prestigious Pallant House Gallery in Chichester. He further won the ‘Young Artist Award’ and the ‘People’s Choice’ Award at the Royal Ulster Academy, Belfast 2014. In 2015 he was awarded the Tyrone Guthrie Residency & in 2017 he was awarded the Whyte's Award at the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin. His Work is included in many private and public collections.


"In many ways our face is a landscape. Years of experiences etch their mark on us physically as well as mentally, shaping who we are and moulding us as people. Our faces tell the story of how we live, our expression etched unto our face through the experiences we've had, the emotion in our eyes the result of the journey we've undertaken to bring us to the present.

Our skin is a timeline of our life style and choices. Through living life, we continually go through a process of cleansing and renewing from the dirt and grime that we pick up through 'life living' both physically and metaphorically. We experience, socialise, go to work, interact and from this activity we need to draw away, to help us make sense of our experiences, to help us grow and learn.

It is the humanity of doing and drawing away, experiencing and learning, socialising and being alone, becoming physically dirty and cleansing that the work comments on. We are products of the people around us, our parents, the social experiences we have, the friendships, struggles and joys, the land itself. We're connected. These are connections which make us one and the same but yet unique as we grow and are shaped, pulled and pushed in many different ways to make us who we are at this present point in time."



YULIA BAS

Total fragmentation is Yulia Bas’s signature style and above all a paradigmatic principle, an existential impulse of her artistic practice. The artist explores how, in the conditions of today’s state of perpetual flux and splitting of information, we are forced to update and reform attempts to gain subjective integrity of identity.

As a result of personal experience of moving from Eastern to Western Europe, artist’s own awareness of self turned into an unsolvable paradox: identity that exists on the border of different cultures. She is no longer Russian as she inhabits the gap between East and West, between the past and the future, the territory of the absence of binary oppositions and hierarchies. Memories, plans, desires - everything acquires its own appearance, and nothing fits into a single coordinate system.

However, the fragmentation of being in Bas’ oeuvre lets go of its negative connotation and becomes a poetic and pensive reflection on a possibility for new consolidation and fundamental openness to regrowth.

The canvas assumes a continuous formation, renewal and constant reassembly. To start this process, it is necessary to interrupt the automatism of disjunctive-conjunctive synthesis. In order to achieve this, Yulia Bas breaks the machinery of the portrait, restarts it and allows the image of a person to oscillate, to remain in form, and in a state of transition.


BIO

Born in Moscow, Russia in 1986, Yulia's eclectic artistic journey began at a very early age. From studying in an art school with a teacher dedicated to old Russian academicism as a child, she went on to complete a degree in interior design and architecture.

Shortly after completing her diploma she has established a successful yacht design studio with her partner. They relocated to Italy first, then to Spain.
After a decade dedicated to yacht design, Yulia felt a longing to return to the canvas once again in 2017. Currently based in Barcelona, Spain.