Neon Babylon: Kimber Berry & Marie Thibeault

Neon Babylon
A showcase of abstract painting by American artists Kimber Berry and Marie Thibeault
21 April – 26 May 2016

American women artists comment on environmental change and the digital age at Gallery Elena Shchukina
This spring, Gallery Elena Shchukina will present a showcase of abstract painting by American women artists. Neon Babylon, which opens 21 April, will mark the first UK exhibition for painters Kimber Berry and Marie Thibeault.

On show will be works from Kimber Berry’s Plastic Garden series, which considers the human psyche and our impact upon the natural world. The works are intricately detailed, with dynamic and organic shapes spiraling across the canvas. Each painting is mixed media, combining the artist’s use of plastics (an ironic and intentional nod to the subject matter) with paint and digital effects. The result is akin to a heightened and surreal encounter with the natural world, as though we are not only looking at a flower but climbing inside it. Berry’s interest lies in our contemporary expansion into nature, and the blurring of reality and illusion.

Berry conjures a sense of the imaginary – of landscapes teeming with both chaos and magic.

Marie Thibeault’s work also considers the relationship between society and nature, exploring man-made structures and destruction, and combining ideas of breakdown and balance with elements of the sublime. Thibeault uses these elements, and the tensions between them, to make sense of events and changes that are 'unbounded, excessive, or chaotic'.

At a time when man’s impact upon the natural world is an issue of such global importance, these works possess a certain urgency, reflected in Thibeault’s use of sharp geometry and bold colour, with subjects seeming almost to explode in fragments towards the viewer.

This exhibition is underpinned by a dynamic consideration of a vital relationship – that of our society and the world we inhabit. But it also reflects upon the relationship between art and the future, forcing us to re-envision the natural world as it rapidly changes all around us.

'Painting has a way of prolonging a visual read by providing a symbolic structure wherein the viewer can negotiate the past and the future by accessing the present moment. I paint to find a form capable of reflecting the paradox and complexity of the world.'

• Marie Thibeault