Hot Dogs (From Oxford Mail)

Hot Dogs

7:00am Thursday 22nd April 2010 in

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This exhibition – Long Dogs & Lingerie – of etchings and collographs by artist and conservation specialist Carolyn Horton will take your breath away, says SARAH MAYHEW.

Intimate, physical, fabulous – that’s Long Dogs & Lingerie at Art Jericho.

Turning furniture into printed sculpture and giving depth to the most flat surface you ever did see, Carolyn Horton’s theatrical and cheeky prints with their flashes of psychedelic colour, strewn lace and lingerie, winking eyes of birds, dogs and children have been etched, printed, overlaid, and reworked, mounted on to screens coloured with natural pigments, and positioned perfectly on each and every picture plane.

Drawing on her interest and deep-rooted knowledge of the classical and an enjoyment of theatre, love and life, Horton prints on to hand-coloured paper composing a mélange of whippets, silk stockings and camisoles that are strewn across beds and trail over sensually padded screens while long dogs lie, curled up or languishing among discarded dressing gowns.

Horton’s collographs of linen have an austere classical beauty that carries powerful resonances of Renaissance and eighteenth century works.

Celebrated printmaker and Royal Academician, Norman Ackroyd once commented on Horton’s work and background: “Carolyn Horton’s experience has given her the authority to extend the medium of printmaking in new and uncharted directions... The result is an extraordinary marriage of observation and imagination.”

Horton is the queen of visual trickery and juxtapositions.

Her work possesses a captivating lightness and delicacy yet has been created as a consequence of a tremendously physical printing process.

Each work of art undergoes a laborious process of creation, borne out of the artist’s involved education and career in conservation, yet somehow, Horton still captures a sense of immediacy, and the instantaneous magic of a moment.

Rizla papers sit, torn on a teenager’s bed, while seductive hot pink stockings, fizz effervescently on a fresco-style canvas; the works are timelessly appealing, exquisitely created, possess a depth defying delicacy while exuding a very contemporary snapshot of everyday existence.

Horton’s acute eye for detail, and innate understanding of artistic methods were first formally recognised more than 20 years ago in 1983 when she was awarded an EEC Scholarship for Fresco Painting in Venice.

Honing her own artistic practice she went on to study Fine Art and Printmaking at Cheltenham College of Art.

Returning to conservation she went on to win the Prix de Rome at the French Academy for Conservation and Printmaking, and her blossoming career took her to Florence, Oxford and Paris where she worked at The Uffizzi, The Bodleian and The Louvre.

In California she studied the conservation of Old Masters, working with an array of Japanese paper under the internationally acclaimed conservator of art Keido Keyes.

Having acquired a wealth of knowledge and experience restoring some of the most beloved treasures in the world, Horton now works from her studio in Gloucestershire turning her talents back to her own practice, and creating treasures of her own, many of which are on show at Art Jericho until 1 May.

Long Dogs & Lingerie is an intimate world of paper bursting with energy.

This is a body of work that commands time and space; many pieces catapult the viewer to the other side of the gallery before slowly enticing you back in through the lure of tactility and a furrowed brow at the wonder of Horton’s achievement of seamless classically contemporary canvases.

If you visit one art exhibition in Oxford this year, I’d suggest you make it this one. This is a unique and breathtakingly beautiful body of work.

Carolyn Horton: Long Dogs & Lingerie continues until May 1 at Art Jericho, 6 King Street, Oxford, OX2 6DF. It is open Wednesday to Saturday 10am–5pm, or by appointment and admission is free All the works of art are for sale unless otherwise indicated