Natural Abstractions: A Group Exhibition at 99 Projects Gallery Culturalee Founder Lee Sharrock curated ‘Natural Abstractions’, a group show at 99 Projects Gallery in West London between 24 February and 18 March 2023. The exhibition opened a year after ‘Rebirth’, an exhibition curated by Lee in 2023 to celebrate the arrival of spring and emergence from 2 years of lockdowns during the pandemic.
‘Natural Abstractions’ featured Noj Barker, Miranda Donovan, Jemima Murphy, Rajan Seth and Sky Sharrock, and explored the relationship between abstract art and natural phenomena. Each artist is inspired by nature, be it in the form of skies, sea, clouds, flowers or foliage.
The Natural Abstraction Hypothesis, proposed by John Wentworth states that “There exist abstractions (relatively low dimensional summaries which capture information relevant for prediction) which are ‘natural’ in the sense that we should expect a wide variety of cognitive systems to converge on using them.”
“The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.” John Berger ‘Ways of Seeing’ (1972)
Abstraction is defined as freedom from representational qualities in art, and the featured artists all use forms, gestural marks, shapes and colour palettes designed to create an abstracted version of reality. Water and liquid forms, weather and atmospheric patterns, lines of structure and growth, the luminosity of fauna and flora, and the palette of the earth provide a cornucopia of source material for artists to abstract. Abstract art is often perceived to have a moral dimension, with elements of spirituality, purity and simplicity.
https://www.99projects.co.uk/natural-abstractions-exhibition-info
