Artist’s Statement
Minna has exhibited extensively throughout her career, including solo and group shows at prominent institutions such as The National Portrait Gallery (BP Portrait Award 1995, 1994), Royal Academy of Arts (Summer Show 2010) and Christies (The Garrick/Milne Prize 2005, 2003, 2000). We’re delighted to host her first Heatherleys solo exhibitions.
I have always favoured painting from life; it as an engagement with my immediate surroundings. So lockdown posed a serious problem, dealing with subjects now remote. To achieve a sense of a physical and emotional encounter I had to enliven the mediated material. This selection of recent paintings is an experiment with images sourced from video and photography. Rather than allow photographs to pin down and fix the image, I have tried to revitalise them, to capture shifting and volatile events. It is a play of imagination, memory and observation. The paintings seem intimate, warm and relaxed, in the sense that they are accepting of an urgency to hold on to fleeting moments. Through colour and the tactility of the marks I try to balance a dynamic visual experience with the act of painting itself.