Madeleine Bialke:Landmark
11.07 – 13.09.2024
Closed
Hours
Monday to Friday
10:00 am – 5:30 pm
Gallery
3–5 Swallow Street
London
W1B 4DE
Huxley-Parlour are pleased to present Landmark, an exhibition of new works on paper by Madeleine Bialke. Presenting ten drawings in ink, the exhibition explores the artist’s continued preoccupation with the natural and the anthropomorphic qualities of trees. The works on paper depict scenes from across London, examining the interplay of built and organic environments.
Bialke embarked on the series in pursuit of a sense of belonging in a new city, following a relocation from New York. Transplanted into new surroundings, the artist sought out the city’s green spaces as a means of anchoring herself within a new territory. Bialke looked to create a shared language for London’s trees and foliage as a vessel through which she may find commonality with an unfamiliar setting. Initially using a list of the great trees of London as a point of departure, Bialke quickly deviated towards those less familiar and more inconsequential. As in her paintings, which often suggest only the hint of the urban with a glowing horizon or a singular building dwarfed by a shroud of trees, Bialke’s works on paper prioritise the natural environment, the city appearing as though a small moment far removed.
The Exhibition
5
B. United States1991
Biography
Madeleine Bialke’s ethereal landscapes emit a dreamlike quality, blanketed in luminescent colours that appear to glow beyond the canvas upon which they are painted. Focussing on the supple rounded forms of trees and flora, Bialke’s nature is anthropomorphised, tree limbs and softly curved plants appear analogous with the figures and animals littered sparsely amongst the picture plane. Within her practice, Bialke uses colour to generate and indicate emotion. Less interested in the accurate hues of a landscape, her colouring favours a silken palette of iridescent and hazy shades.
Bialke was born in 1991 in New York. In 2013, she received her BFA in Studio Art from the Plattsburgh State University of New York and gained an MFA in Painting at Boston University, Massachusetts, in 2016. Bialke completed a residency at North Western Oklahoma State University in 2018 and in 2024 was the artist-in-residence at the Nemeth Art Center, Park Rapids, Minnesota. In 2016, she was awarded the John Walker MFA Painting and Sculpture Award. Bialke has had solo exhibitions internationally, mostly recently Giants in the Dusk, Huxley-Parlour, London; Death Motel, Newchild Gallery, Antwerp in 2022; Nine Lives, Steve Turner, Los Angeles in 2022; Long Summer, Huxley-Parlour, London in 2021; Mothers & Daughters, Visions West Contemporary, Denver in 2020. Her work is included in the collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody, the X Museum, and Fundación MEDIANOCHE0. She lives and works in London.