The crucifixion and other popular stories is a two-person show featuring new work by East Sussex painters Luke Hannam and Paco de Quesada at the Rye Creative Centre in New Road.
It opens this Saturday April 22 from 2pm until 5pm, and then runs until May 6 from 11am-3pm Wednesday to Saturday each week, or by appointment. For more information please contact ryecreativecentre.co.uk or 01797-229797.
Luke Hannam relocated from London to Rye in 2010 with the sole aim of developing his painting practice alongside his musical career as the bass player in cult, punk funk band GRAMME. Hannam cites his influences as lying equally between The Fall, James White & the Contortions and Picasso. For Hannam, art making is an attitude and cannot be contained by mediums.
Luke graduated from Canterbury College of Art in 1987 and attributes this experience as fundamental in the development of his lifelong obsession with drawing. Hannam produces more than 100 drawings a week. Religious imagery and fairy stories such as Hansel and Gretel and Goldilocks are recurring themes, alongside many drawings of the East Sussex countryside, which he makes whilst walking his poodle Darwin. For Hannam, the everyday experience sits next to the profound and must be investigated with equal importance.
Paco de Quesada, is a Spanish artist living and working in Bexhill. Since completing his BA in Fine Art at the Universidad de Sevilla in 1998, he has exhibited in group and solo shows across Spain, the UK and Germany.
For Paco art must be a personal challenge; must take you out of your comfort zone, to the edge, ‘where fear lives’. His large scale, graphic paintings are influenced by his work as a graphic designer and reflect his interest in the immediacy and simplicity of commercial art. Graffiti and outsider art also resonate particularly the street art of his native Seville.
For this exhibition Paco brings religious iconography face to face with contemporary culture with all its flashy imagery and infinite clichés, acting as a mirror held up to our lives, our society and our very human nature.
Photos : Courtesy Luke Hannam/Paco de Quesada