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DIANA RATTRAY
“BORROWED MOMENTS”
Exhibition November 5, 2010 – January 14, 2011 /
extended to January 28, 2011
Born
in Windsor, England, Diana Rattray lives and
works in Düsseldorf, where she studied at the Kunstakademie
and, under Erwin Heerich, received the Meisterschüler
distinction.
Contemplate a Diana Rattray picture and something quite
odd happens. In the first few seconds, one fancies one is
looking at an old photograph and, in turn, being catapulted by
it into another world, a different time, another
context.
Rattray’s style is quite her own, a blend of tradition,
individuality and objectivity drawing its inspiration from the
1950s and 60s as transmitted through black-and-white snaps
from English and German post-war photo albums.
The
artist’s own reading of this historical pictorial matrix is
highly realistic and she interprets it in the same vein. With
the requisite pinch of irony, however, she lends the
positivism of the 1950s a twist with situations as the outcome
that may be comic, awry or eccentric and quirky.
The
world of Diana Rattray’s pictures is peopled by figures the
types of which will be familiar to everyone – people at family
celebrations, children in their Sunday best, families on
day-trips – events recorded in order to have remembrance of
this special day or that one moment on tap at any time.
But it is not the idyll of the family that interests
Rattray. In works like Two Views or The
Wedding, to name only two examples, the fascination lies
in the people depicted in those scenes – their situation
behind the picture and their lot after the
picture. That is the reason the artist limits her photographic
sources to images of people she knows and, as she says, why
she plies them as she does.
Some of the people in
Rattray’s pastel works seem to be adopting poses. They suspend
what they are doing, face the viewer and lay on a smile in the
knowledge that it will be recorded. The smile conditioned for
the purpose is a preoccupation in this artist’s work. It is a
smile that only takes place on the surface and reveals nothing
about a person’s inner being.
At
first glance it seems as if these paintings preserve a time in
which everything was that little bit more ordered, a little
simpler. But the viewer also becomes conscious of the
choreographed nature of the scene. By heightening her
colouring and amplifying a situation depicted, the artist
points us toward a wider scope of meaning. The subtle
elaboration of areas of shadow hints at the emotional world
beyond the visible surface. A melancholy trait comes to the
smiling lips, and something rigid to the faces; and, finding
themselves face-to-face with the figures in the pictures,
viewers are thrown back upon themselves. As a chronicler and
at the same time an alert contemporary, Diana Rattray makes
use of the distance in time and space to reconnect emotional
memory.
The
life stories of Rattray’s figures, modelled on the real people
recorded in the photographs, are a central component of her
pictures. Subtle gestures and glances serve as indications of
things yet to come. Simultaneously, the everyday nature of the
situations she chooses for her pastel paintings lends them a
universality. Personal memory is triggered by the recognition
of certain situations and the figures in Diana Rattray’s
paintings become the projection surfaces for moments and
feelings in the viewer’s own experience.
Diana Rattray. Borrowed Moments is an
exhibition in co-operation with Galerie Michael Haas,
Berlin/Zürich.
Exhibition extended to January 28, 2011.
The
Gallery is open Tuesday – Friday 12 noon – 6 pm, Saturday 12
noon – 4pm; and by appointment.
Image:
Diana Rattray
"Two
Views"
2010
Pastel
on paper, mounted on board,
framed
with museum glass and wooden frame
162 x
124 cm / 63.8 x 47.2 inches
Courtesy
Galerie Bugdahn und Kaimer
Galerie Bugdahn und
Kaimer
Heinrich-Heine-Allee 19
Neustraße 12
D -
40213 Düsseldorf
Germany
T +49
21132 91 40
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