Selina Foote
Bow

Bow is a new exhibition of paintings by Selina Foote, yet the paintings themselves are not new. Most of these were made in 2013, while Selina was living in Bow, London. This is their first debut in Aotearoa.
 
There is a lightness to the works in Bow, perhaps because many of them are painted on silk primed so the grain of their wooden stretchers can be glimpsed between flickering opaque shapes. Titled for the area of east London where Foote lived and painted them, each work was developed in response to historic portrait paintings, some of which she was able to visit regularly, given her proximity to The National Portrait Gallery and The Courtauld. Foote’s abstractions unravel these references to the point of unrecognizability, with only subtle clues lingering in their composition, palettes and titles.