MIRANDA DONOVAN
GENESIS

PRIVATE VIEW: 22 MAY 6-8pm
EXHIBITION: 23 MAY-12 JUNE 2024

Miranda Donovan paints walls. Fragments of the city, formed of fading layers, textures and colours which speak of histories collapsed on a surface. They frame the road less travelled, walls once bright with paint now perhaps overlooked on our way out of town. Every piece is rendered in exquisite photorealistic detail, forged in her Willesden Junction studio, where she has developed a unique process of building up acrylic and oil over building materials mixed with poIymers.

Miranda Donovan

No Pressure

50 x 70cm

Oil, acrylic and mixed media on canvas

Miranda Donovan

Journey

50 x 70cm

Oil, acrylic and mixed media on canvas

Such a style of painting combines techniques of the construction trade with notes of Surrealism and Street Art to evoke her beautiful urban landscapes, and landed her instant success after graduating from City and Guilds in 2005. Nick Woolff was one of the first to recognise her to be ‘pulling away at the sides’ of what contemporary painting was then all about. Within a year, she was picked up by Banksy’s former agent Lazarides Gallery, and has featured in several prominent art galleries, major auction houses and exhibitions ever since. As a formidable contemporary painter, she challenges the notion that opposites are unrelated, bridging together public and private, urban and rural, order and chaos, beauty and decay.

Donovan’s works are no stranger to the established rostra of art world names, exhibiting with Christie’s, Frieze and Sotheby’s New York, where she was featured as a Highlight of Contemporary Street Art in 2021. With such an impressive list of public and private collectors under her belt (Soho House, House of Koko, Groucho Club, Frank Cohen, the Mugrabis, Mark Hix, Stephen Webster and the Khalili brothers to name a few), and an equally enviable list of co-exhibitors (Ai Wei Wei, David Hockney, Anthony Gormley, Grayson Perry, Maggie Hambling and Julian Opie), she returns to Woolff Gallery this May with a collection of never-before-seen works.

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Miranda Donovan

Mind Switch

90 x 130cm

Oil, acrylic and mixed media on canvas

Miranda Donovan

Always Choose Love

50 x 70cm (not including perspex frame)

Acrylic and mixed media on Rosaspina paper in perspex box

ALWAYS CHOOSE LOVE which like many of her newest mixed-media works on canvas, board, or Rosaspina paper, is an urban still life in a state of joyful disrepair. We might think this to be an abandoned neighbourhood, with its tangle of telephone wires and exposed concrete, but it is far from it. It is a home for our past lives, our hopes and our dreams, always accompanied by one of Donovan’s figures playfully pointing us towards the light.

Miranda Donovan

Confronting Fears

50 x 70cm (not including perspex frame)

Oil, acrylic and mixed media on Rosaspina paper in perspex box

CONFRONTING FEARS contains two judge-like figures who bear witness to a barn flooded in a mysterious, almost welcoming darkness. Left unguarded, the viewer is invited to roam.

“When I’m building up these surfaces, I’m wanting to put down different languages. I want to reflect that its not just made by one hand" MIRANDA DONOVAN

Miranda Donovan

Never Alone

50 x 70cm (not including perspex frame)

Oil, acrylic and mixed media on Rosaspina paper in perspex box

Marked by an evolution and aesthetic shift from Donovan's signature wall paintings, GENESIS builds on what came before. Now, lurking in the very fabric of her constructed walls are surrealist figures: mechanical characters who seem to emerge from her subconscious to call on the constructions we create in ourselves. Although they belong very much to her world, they equally represent archetypal roles we may all relate to: the rebel, the dancer, the judge, the fawn.

Miranda Donovan

Break Free

180 x 130cm

Oil, acrylic and mixed media on canvas

Miranda Donovan

Mental Strength

180 x 130cm

Oil, acrylic and mixed media on canvas

She cites Dutch Golden Age masters Jacob van Ruisdael and Pieter de Hooch as inspiration, visible in her work’s low-hanging horizons, but equally, because each painting is imbued with a certain richness of light. This magical glow was picked up from childhood summers spent in Gozo and as a young art student in Aix-en-Provence. As the viewer, we want to enter it, following her verdant roadsides into brighter cul-de-sacs and ‘New Worlds’ (always read the graffiti). MENTAL STRENGTH, a gorgeous symphony of turquoise on a purple wall surrounded by lush tropical trees, celebrates the joy to be found in these textures. There is a sense of perfect order in this chaos of drips, and again in BREAK FREE, where Donovan's grid-like process of bricklaying is visible beneath a layer of dusky rose.

Miranda Donovan

Reach for the Stars

122 x 94cm

Oil and mixed media on birch ply board

Miranda Donovan

Stay in Trust

130 x 90cm

Oil, acrylic and mixed media on canvas

Miranda Donovan

Always Connected

140 x 122cm

Oil, acrylic and mixed media on board

Miranda Donovan

Inner Voice

130 x 130cm

Oil, acrylic and mixed media on canvas

Seeing these works in the flesh, it’s hard not to ask why we haven’t always associated beauty with decay, or the urban with the rural, and why indeed we relate to one particular piece over another. Through Donovan, we get a glimpse of the genesis of contrasts in which we live both as people, with multiple internal lives, and as a wider, increasingly globalized population living in an ever-growing patchwork of new and neglected builds. It is no wonder she also cites Anselm Kiefer and Sean Scully as inspirations, for these too are highly-structured collages of paint, rooted though they are in a cool, calm otherworldliness.

GENESIS will be on show at Woolff Gallery from the 22nd May to the 12th June 2024. The gallery is delighted to have such a seminal and collectible painter back on board.