"Peindre c'est fabriquer du silence"
- Pierre Boncompain
PIERMARQ* is pleased to present The Silence Tasters, an exhibition of new paintings by Galina Munroe. This is her third solo exhibition at the gallery in Sydney since 2019.
Inspired by a quote from the modern French master, Pierre Boncompain, the artist explores the concept that “To paint is to create silence”. Void of the human figure, Munroe’s new paintings embody a quiet, peaceful, daydreamy kind of solitude where objects from nature are suspended in a cheerfully skewed reality. Munroe explains, “I like to imagine everyone is asleep in these paintings, they have left the room for an afternoon nap, the garden is quiet”. Works such as Ciboulette du jardin give the viewer a charming vignette into an intimate moment, inviting us to the table and encouraging one to speculate - what would it taste like?
An interpretation of the classic still-life, Munroe’s new body of work brings her musings on the notion of passing time into a fresh context that expands upon the bold, tactile materiality of her repertoire. In her signature style, Munroe uses layers of oil paint, a slow drying medium that draws out the completion of each work to anywhere from weeks to months. Her loose, abstract method of layering means that her works only come to fruition towards the very end, similar to the life-cycle of her subject matter, fruit, vegetables, flora and greenery. In this way, the passage of time is prevalent, in both process and motif, invoking connotations of life, death and what we see, taste, grow, and experience in between.
Galina Munroe (b. 1993) is a British-French artist who graduated with an MFA from Central Saint Martins in London. Over the past year, she has exhibited widely across Europe, including London, Berlin, Cologne, Copenhagen and Milan. Her practice investigates a surreal and abstract world in which shifting shapes and forms illustrate the surface of her canvases. Her recognizable visual style is the result of collaging and layering to produce a rustic textural quality behind bold, graphic motifs.
