Altrincham’s AIR Gallery hosts collection of award-winning artists for special group exhibition

Altrincham’s AIR Gallery has assembled the four winners of last year’s AIR Open for a special group exhibition showcasing how each artist has developed over the last year since scooping their accolades.

Re-Call is a collection of new works by Candice Dehnavi, Gustavo Ferro, Jayne Anita Smith and Naomi Kendrick with a focus on memory, learned experience, nostalgia and instinct.

Jayne Anita Smith is an abstract figurative artist whose paintings are born from automatic drawings produced on an intimate scale in oil paint. Smith uses these first, primitive marks, as a pathway to connect to the subconscious, to her internal voices. From these first raw brushstrokes, the tentative figurative forms start to emerge and claim their presence.

Through drawing Naomi Kendrick attempts to make visible an inner world, the sensations, patterns of thought and feeling that come with different mental states, from the darkest times to the euphoric. Their current work involves drawing thousands of tiny, time consuming, delicate ink lines onto fragile paper, some of which have taken years to complete.

Candice Dehnavi’s practice focuses on social interactions and the spaces between them. They often return to the setting of childhood, positioning their works as reconstructed memories of growing up in a hotel, and traversing the landscape of an unknown culture and ethnicity that they simultaneously feel they have lost and that they were never truly part of to begin with.

Gustavo Ferro uses his memory of the places they’ve been to, mixed with reflections about intimacy and queerness to create abstract narratives. These recent works on show come from a series exploring artificial landscapes based on memories of the North Shore of Blackpool.