HESSE FLATOW is delighted to present Emergency, a solo exhibition of London and North Norfolk-based painter and printmaker Plum Cloutman. The exhibition, the artist’s first in the United States, features sixteen works richly redolent of Cloutman’s idiosyncratic world and distinct sensibility.
Whole scenarios unfold in her elusive story-book vignettes, drawing the viewer into their unknown narratives. These are moments where the curtain is peeled back to reveal her protagonists poised on the edge of action, or plunged into the consequences. Cloutman’s work carries echoes of the past in their literary quality. Each vignette mines the emotional depth or subtle humour of a particular moment, just as it is.
Many of the works are set in intimate domestic sphere: a figure leans against a kitchen table laden with meat as barely visible guests look on from the side, holding glasses of wine; a couple standing and cloaked, ready to leave a party; a woman sitting, breasts bare, peering at her reflection in a dressing-table mirror.
Cloutman’s work is drawn with pastels and watercolor pencil in an earthy and soft, muted palette that appears to belong to the English countryside. Her style of drawing is loose and painterly with a relaxed flow; each mark blends and unites with those around it. Small enough in size to fit into an English post box and made on a kitchen table, these paintings are products of necessity.
Artist Biography
Plum Cloutman is a painter and printmaker whose work has been awarded the Catriona White Prize, the Lyon and Turnbull Prize, and was featured in the 2019 Royal Society of Arts New Contemporaries exhibition. She graduated in 2018 from Edinburgh College of Art. This is Cloutman’s first exhibition in the United States.