GALAXY BALLROOM | NIT DE L'ART
21.09 - 15.11.2024

GALAXY BALLROOM 21.09.2024 – 15.11. 2024

Galeria Fermay is pleased to present Galaxy Ballroom, a solo exhibition by Scottish/ Dutch artist Janice McNab.

Janice McNab’s oil paintings are known for their silent flowing depths, and for their unique transformations of the fabric of everyday life – our clothes, food, and little things. The artist embeds these almost invisible everyday objects within a feminist surreal in which sensed life meets the wider social and political field. This is informed by psychoanalysis but her painting also shimmers with art historical references. For the last twenty-five years, this research-driven practice has also traced a growing anxiety tied to overconsumption and ecological decline. McNab has modelled worlds out of single- use plastics, broken aeroplane chairs, figures of melting ice that are also ice cream, and in her most recent work, fragile landscapes drawn from the folds of an old scarf.

These new paintings are the focus of Galaxy Ballroom. They are vivid, dystopic vistas inspired by a patterned scarf that belonged to the artist’s mother. McNab has turned the silk folds of its 1950’s garden design into sweeps of oil paint that contort her hand shadows as they flow across the fabric. The 1950’s are no more and these shadows suggest the animals and birds we have now lost to our new climate reality. In other paintings, there are floating bodies cut from Aloe vera leaves, distorted flowers, and stars shining through translucent skins. These all remind us of the living world but also of our own touch, of silk running through our fingers. They are landscapes of what we feel and have multiple perspectives, cuts, breaks and absences.

This exhibition also marks the launch of Janice McNab’s monograph publication: Galaxy Ballroom, a Dance with Hilma af Klint (Jap Sam Books, 2024). This focusses on the research underlying these new paintings, especially the interplay between the artist’s work in the studio and her archival study. McNab has traced ecological and feminist image roots within a series of paintings by Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862- 1944). Her close reading of this series ties its design to traditional Nordic textile patterns. Re-imagining this act of looking back to one’s textile heritage to make paintings that address today and tomorrow then became the movement that led McNab to her mother’s scarf, and to the work in this exhibition.

Janice McNab was born in Aberfeldy, Scotland in 1964, and graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 1997. Her PhD is from the University of Amsterdam and she lives in The Hague, where she is Head of the MA Artistic Research at The Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. Her personal research often involves studying the work of other women artists and she was a 2022-23 fellow of the WISC, the Women’s International Study Centre in Santa Fe, working on Galaxy Ballroom, both the paintings and the book. She was also a Paul Brach Invited artist to Cal-Arts, Los Angeles in 2021.

Recent exhibitions include Our Spectral Gardens, Gallery Maurits van de Laar, The Hague (2023); True North, Galeria Fermay (2023); Scottish Women Artists: Transforming Tradition, Sainsbury Centre, Norwich (2022); Here We Go, Galeria Fermay, (2022); Open Letter, Page Not Found, The Hague (2022); Janice McNab : Slits and a Skull, Bradwolff Projects, Amsterdam (2021), y A New World, Stroom, The Hague (2021).

Recent writing is included in Forms of Life: Hilma af Klint and Piet Mondrian, Tate Publications, London (2023); RSR Anniversary Issue on Surrealism, Rice University, Houston (2024), and Haevan Lee, Battleground, Arts Council of Korea (Oct. 2024).