Charlie Billingham, Lewis Brander, Natalia González Martín and
George Rouy have all previously exhibited with Collective Ending, an artist-led
initiative and collectively run studio and gallery complex in Deptford, South
London, founded by Campbell alongside eleven others in 2019. Billingham, a
graduate of The University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh College of Art (MA Joint
Honours, Fine Art and History of Art, 2008) and the Royal Academy Schools
(Postgraduate Diploma, 2013), mines Georgian and Regency-era satirical prints
for subject matter that speaks to either a personal or shared experience,
before recomposing, recontextualising and redefining the imagery to create
21st-century appropriations.
Brander, a graduate of Goldsmiths (BFA, 2018),
captures fleeting moments and fading memories in compositions that approach
sentimentality as a subject in and of itself, depicting crumbling Greek
colonnades, lounging lovers or listless London and Athenian skies. González
Martín, a graduate of City & Guilds of London Art School (BFA, 2017),
paints on wood panels with soft washes of diluted oils, her empowered maidens
an amalgamation of personal preparatory photographs, stock internet imagery and
historical or religious references evident of the artist's connection to the
Catholic iconography of her upbringing. Rouy, a graduate of Camberwell College
of Arts (BFA, 2015), combines the artistic lineage of the nude with
contemporary socio-cultural considerations surrounding gender, sexuality and
the body in portraits defined by their expressive gestural mark-making and use
of hand-mixed paint and hand-ground pigments.
Benjamin Spiers, a graduate of both Falmouth University (1991) and
Goldsmiths (1992), pairs methodical skills with a mastery of surrealism,
abstraction and cubism in paintings that exposes our innermost fears and
fantasies. Featuring figures seemingly at ease with their unconventional
appearance, they welcome the viewer to a distorted world of magic and mystery.
During his time as a tutor at City & Guilds of London Art School, Spiers
taught the likes of exhibiting artists Brander, González Martín and Oli Epp.
Epp, a graduate of City & Guilds of London Art School (BFA, 2017), creates
cartoonish caricatures that reflect our contemporary consumer culture, complex
relationship to technology and social media, and tragicomic existence in the
21st-century's identity and aesthetic-obsessed society. Campbell serves as a
tutor on The Plop Residency, an artist-run residency co-founded by Epp and
curator Aindrea Emelife in 2018 that provides studios, mentorship and
exhibition opportunities to international artists as part of a supportive wider
community.
