Diana Copperwhite

Onomatopoeia

Flowers Gallery is delighted to present Irish painter Diana Copperwhite's first solo exhibition with the gallery. This selection of new paintings marks an extension of the artist's lauded use of abstraction to explore notions of memory and perception against the visual chaos of twenty-first century life. The exhibition shares its title with Copperwhite's touring show that took place at Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda, Limerick City Gallery of Art, Limerick and Galway International Arts Festival between March and July 2023.

Painting for Copperwhite is a means of systematizing information, which she describes as "giving the unseen world visual form." Derived from her lifelong interest in chemistry and physics, she visualises the canvas as a kind of "notational system". Her distinctive, undulating, kinetic streaks of colour appear at once autonomous, like light through a prism, and diagrammatic, as if mapping and charting forces invisible to the naked eye.

Four large new paintings Disjointed Entropy, Neural, Morocco and Seclusion (all 2023) are expansive, theatrical manifestations of these ideas - at three metres wide they constitute, Copperwhite reflects, "their own environments." Her lyrical and dynamic textural forms are articulated with a brush or knife, giving the surface of the work an almost architectural quality. In part a reaction to the grey weather of her Irish home, her approach to colour is equally expressive, demonstrating her proclivity towards bold hues in the pulsating rainbows of Seclusion, moody blues of Neural and dynamic pinks of Morrocco.

A series of accompanying smaller paintings, Notes on Lightness, Notes on Darkness, feature faceless figures, painted with colour bands across their faces, both reflecting the dematerialisation of individual identity in an increasingly technological world and stressing the persistence of human presence