Judith Dean

New Builds / Bilds 2: did you mean peace?

1 May—14 June 2025

South Parade is pleased to present Judith Dean’s second solo exhibition at the gallery.

Through expanding-containing perspectives and spaces within spaces - sometimes empty, un-roofed and leaky, or dripping beyond borders - Judith Dean disrupts the cartographic project, of mapping time, history, and distance, with a sense of dis-placement. New-placement. Re-placement. Sensed via stretched frames of imagery, at times one frame isolated, others in potential dialogue with neighbouring ones. Disorientation, through the sheer vastness of subject matter - jerking across hemispheres and cycles - and the lack of total control in the artist’s making, with a use of non-writing hand, freed through Chinese brushes offering bleeding swathes of colour. Colour as molecular notation, as feeling, as a reckoning between artist, surface and scene. Disorientation, but stabilised through paintings, their persistence of presence, however nomadic-temporary. Fluidity in the functions of these images; dissolved hierarchies insisted in their arrangement; images their own agents.

Moments constructed de-constructing, re-constructing, before us. I know there are others seeing what I am seeing though. Images undulating as though in slow motion. Sunsets and sunrises, water-flowers like dreams witnessed by every viewer/passenger/wonderer/wanderer on the other side of the (canvas) screen/window/eye. Maybe our communal blur could take on the mantle of the Real, a Real we might one day recognise. For now, liminality - from lumen, illumination - offering constant play between veiling and unveiling. Subject matters - first gleaned from the world wide webbed commons - as data constantly scrambled by fissures of understanding. Data as dreams, dreams as electrical discharges. What to prioritise in our assembled inventory, how to negotiate the gestural excess? Without coordinates, here we limn our own routes.

Out of uncertainty, openness for this logic of slippages. Making sense of outlined spaces, I find them unravelling, and yet somehow resolving themselves into order of sorts. Lines form distinct units, but the space between them resonant. Looking preceding thinking, sensing shapes before trying to make sense linguistically. Trying to come closer to what I imagine to be naturally occurring images; amongst them, a reckoning with Nature, so steeped in twisting histories of commerce, industry, culture. Muddied, but then elsewhere preserved and so alive, familiar - I seek out a single sapling reaching towards the light. Perception enlivened, but not all-knowing, all-seeing. Still more meaning to make. Even the man-made doesn’t have the answers I first searched for, scenes instead presented like a mirage, a ghostly apparition of what I thought I wanted to see. The halo of hot gaseous storm-fumes - close to home? A spy-hole / worn-out balcony ledge to peer onto a chateau-ed landscape in which I expect to find serenity. In which there isn’t always. Such vistas once workers’ land, time a watercolour across then and now, levelling with questions and intensity. Across the hills, a goat stands adjacent to its familial skeleton, bone bridges bringing us to our present tense, shuttling us into our future. Whether our bones will carry us across these geologies for much longer, we do not know either.

Paint-strokes and mind wondering/wandering. The world unfolded through working at varying speeds; pigment densities; oscillating levels of figuration to abstraction, of in-/completion; offering faux illusion of frames, illusions of illusions. For-a-moment shadows shifting from the edges of painted planes and the plane I’ve located myself. Shadows that move mounted canvas to tangible sculpted object, pictorial presence wrapping a surface and a room. Never quite sure where to stand, to look; whether to move closer, up and into each warped frame of reference. Knowing I haven’t been to these places - perhaps one day - but then the question arises of when was this taken and from where. Questioning the limits, the types of human involvement in these spaces. I note Dean’s searching in the breath of attentiveness, through the practice of Hua Gong and untamed marks. Considering the room’s energy my own. The multitude of responses spilling out from web-links, and before that spilling countless photos from international strangers’ meandering cameras. Forms captured, processed and released into the media mire, offered as prompts, unconditionally. Installed into our gallery of witnessing. A girl or seraphim, X-ray of a dreamt vision or a nightmare? Did you mean a poppy field, or did you mean peace?

By Lucy Rose Cunningham

-

Judith Dean (b.1965, Billericay, UK) lives and works in London and graduated from Wimbledon School of Art, London (1988) and Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam (1993).

Recent solo exhibitions include One Thing and the Others, Bodenrader (Chicago, USA, 2024), New Builds / Bilds (The Image in Perspective), South Parade (London, UK, 2023) and June Art Fair, South Parade (Basel, CH, 2023). Recent two person exhibitions include Of Strangers, Shahin Zarinbal (Berlin, DE, 2024) and Stolen Hours, 12.26 (Dallas, USA, 2024).

Recent group exhibitions include A separate place between the thought and felt, South Parade (London, UK, 2024), the no plan plan, JVDW Gallery (Düsseldorf, DE, 2024), Inaugural Group Exhibition, Bodenrader (Chicago, USA, 2023), The World Was All Before Them, TULCA (Galway, IE, 2022), A gathering, Project 78 Gallery (St. Leonards-on-Sea, UK, 2022) & The Void, White Columns Online (New York, USA, 2021).

Since her first solo exhibition in 1990, Dean has exhibited extensively internationally including at the Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney (Sydney, AU, 1997) and in Germany, Japan, Czech Republic and France, including solo exhibitions at Hales (London, UK, 1997 & 2000). Dean was the winner of the Jerwood Sculpture Prize (2005) and a Senior Lecturer in Fine Arts at UWE, Bristol (2008-24).

The text by Lucy Rose Cunningham can also be read here