To compare two artists is to compare two lives lived, we would hope and expect for difference naturally, and in the case of this exhibition, the method and style used to create artwork would be no exception. These two artists linked initially as at one-time, teacher and student, where their respective artwork has travelled in great geographic boomerang like arc to meet at the the same point of reunion through paint in the same location side by side. Two very different artists in the world they represent, but what unites them is a kind of a weighty sense of nature as wild untameable entity that overwhelms in a strange, sometimes surreal way the work of nature, its creatures and habitat, its beauty and cruelty. Ann-Caroline Breig and Derek Ogbourne love nature and express it in different ways. Both somewhat troubled by what humans have inflicted on both nature and one another.
Breig’s recent ‘paintings’ show dense strong and often decorative landscapes in which drama, beauty and chaos form natural abstractions. Her process of painting birds and other living creatures in their habitat are acts of empathy and reverence for nature. She sees her use of symbolism reflect the state of todays world. Brieg’s choice of subject matter are important to her painting process, they are the starting point as she builds layers of materials as well as paint creating collages, saturated with colour and focused on the in between and close up in amongst the dense forested undergrowth of her native Sweden.
Ogbourne's paintings in this series are innately physical responses to worlds of land and sea, where often a sublime twilight world is hinted upon, light is precious and sears out from the horizon which almost always tilts and unsettlingly twists like in an emotional vortex. This background is obscured by a foreground that fights, disrupts and negates any peace or romantic complacency. Paint is often laid on in thick clumps to create body to sometimes strange and surreal forms that are about to be either swallowed up by a great wave, dominate or obscure the sense of realism that lays behind ugly/beautiful twists of highly impasto paint.
Derek Ogbourne’s oeuvre is multi-faceted. His periods of production can be broken down to large organic paintings (early 1980s), interactive art installations (late 1980s), performance art (1990s), video and filmic narrative explorations (2000s to the present), and his museum installation entitled The Museum of Optography (2007- 2016) A return to painting from 2017 culminated in his Lockdown Series of 2020 and Blue Series of 2023. Exhibition highlights include What Makes Me, What Makes You at the South London Gallery, Space International, Valencia, Spain and the The Museum of Optography,
The Purple Chamber, for which he is best known internationally, at Sharjah Foundation, UAE. His film Bison Hill (2022) gained a number of film festival awards, including the Luis Buñuel Prize. Derek Ogbourne studied at Slade School of Fine Art (1981-89). Ann-Caroline Breig studied at Royal Academy of Arts in London (2004-06), during which she received the Mayfair Arts Club Excellence in Drawing Award the British Institution Award and Clifford Chance printmaking prize. She exhibited twice at the R A Summer Exhibition. In 2007 After finishing her studies in London, Breig returned to Sweden where she continued her studio practice to the present day. She founded the art institution Konstkraft and was the artistic leader and curator between (2009-21). During this period she was twice awarded prizes as artistic inspirer and entrepreneur. In 2022 Caroline received the Golden Key award in Sweden.