STUDIO WEST presents its inaugural group show, The Reality in Whytch You Create, bringing together new works by a selection of London’s most exciting emerging artists.

The exhibition explores reality in an expanded sense, drawing on dreams, subconscious experience, and myths. The artists separately create surreal depictions of space, unusual characters and new assemblages of images which disorient and challenge the veracity of our experiences.

Largely through painting, accompanied by Wu’s sound and video work, each artist unveils pieces that collapse and blend facets of the imaginary with the everyday.

The title of the exhibition comes directly from a work by painter Alfie Rouy, who will exhibit dream-like pieces that create an eerie universe inhabited by serpentine creatures. Anna Woodward investigates utopian and dystopian states in relation to the natural world through painting. She will show her renderings of post-human environments populated by ambiguous plants and insects. Complimenting work by Woodward, Lydia Makin’s compelling large-scale abstract pieces and images of subversive, saintly figures in luscious oil paint will be displayed.

Multi-disciplinary artist Salomé Wu will present an installation consisting of video and sound pieces. She examines otherworldliness through translations and ever-evolving reinterpretations of a personal mythology, formed from her observation of time, fragility, and the interplay between reality and the unseen. Also on show will be Sholto Blissett’s instantly recognisable and perfectly constructed surreal landscapes. Eerily quiet, these scenes are often set amongst vast mountainscapes, immediately enveloping the viewer in a meditative and transformative universe. His work has already garnered significant attention, having recently been exhibited at Peres Projects, White Cube and Saatchi Gallery.

Sholto Blissett, Garden of Hubris XXV, 2021, Oil on Canvas on Board, 110 x 100cm

The works on show are united by a common theme, that of world building, and draw on significant shared influences such as surrealism, classicism, architecture, fantasy and escapism. The artists question the limits of our environment; common motifs connect the works and invite the viewer to observe the similarities and differences in each artists’ presentation of their imagined world. The exhibited pieces largely consist of paintings, complimented by AV work, which blend fluidly, mixing ideas and expanding on the questions posed by each work alone.

This triumphant exhibition emerges from the forced extended ‘winter’ of the global pandemic and thrusts the viewer into the warmth of the artists’ worlds. It will be accompanied by an artist Q&A, alongside special events by Salomé Wu including a workshop, an evening performance by her band, and a hand painted mural inside the gallery.