Featuring the work of Priscilla Bourne (AUS), Emmy Bridgwater (UK), Scott Daniel Ellison (USA), Julia Schmidt Healy (USA), Matt Hunt (NZ), Thornton Dial (USA), Tony De Lautour (NZ), Richard Killeen (NZ), CJ Pyle (USA), Rebecca Shore (USA), Mose Tolliver (USA) Ray Yoshida and Frances Waite UK
Exhibitied at hughes - view by appointment.
Much has been recently written by critics and proffered by curators in a reassessment of Surrealism in its centenary year. Some voices from the past have been silenced (hushed) and newly discovered ones amplified. Surrealism has become the artform of the marginalised and the dispossessed for a new age of museum politics. However, whatever new spirit Big Art has given to the timeless ism – nothing can subdue its most powerful possession – the beautiful spark – the beloved imagination of the artist.
We live in troubling times where uninspiring algorithms as much as the sniggering of underwhelming peers drive artists towards the blandest of comfort zones. This exhibition and the entire programming ethos of this gallery is to find the balance between Outside/In.
Subconscious reflection and conscious introspection are both at the heart of historical Surrealism, contemporary fantasists and the vernacular, self-taught and so-called outsider artists. This gallery is committed to championing artists with dedicated to an inner vision with little care about following fashion. My first job in the arts was with London’s Mayor Gallery which was one of the first to show the Surrealists in 1925. I then worked with my father’s gallery, always a home for raw introspection, founded in 1969. Today with Olsen, it is a great joy to build a new home for artists hungry for more than Instagram likes, for thinking collectors curious to look outside the square and for curators determined not to be cushions and simply bear the impression of whichever international peer last sat on them.
Evan Hughes, May 2024
