Good Eye Projects x Next at Christie's - Exhibition Text
Originally published to accompany the Good Eye Projects x Next at Christie's group exhibition at Christie’s (London, 12th - 20th January)
January 2023

Founded in 2022 by artist Anna Woodward (Artist), Scott Franklin (Founder, Property Guardian Protection) and Sam Senchal (Collector & Patron), Good Eye Projects is a new artist residency programme supporting emerging and early-career artists. Good Eye Projects provides six artists with free studio space in Hammersmith, West London, for a period of twelve weeks, allowing them the freedom to advance their practice as part of a supportive peer group. Alongside, Good Eye Projects arranges regular studio visits and tutorials with industry professionals, as well as off-site activities hosted by members of the artist selection panel; curator and writer Hector Campbell, gallerist Freddie Powell and Christie’s specialist Marie-Claire Thijsen. These added benefits allow the artists access to advice and mentorship from those at the centre of the London art scene's vibrant creative ecosystem.

After the first free-to-apply open call received around one hundred applications, Good Eye Projects welcomed its first cohort of residents to the studios in September 2022; Kate Burling, Eva Dixon, Vilte Fuller, Henry Gibbs, Choon Mi Kim & Abi Ola.

Kate Burling, a recent graduate from Camberwell College of Arts’ BA Fine Art Painting programme, has rooted her latest work in an ongoing investigation of our human hands, both literally and figuratively. Not only do they act as the artist’s primary subject matter, Burling has also adopted a sophisticated take on childlike finger painting during the physical making process. Additionally, always thinking in the third dimension, she introduces various vibrant ribbons of anxious energy that invariably interact with the depicted digits. Raised from the surface almost as relief, they serve to both abstract and entertain the already blurred bodies.

Eva Dixon, currently enrolled on the BA Fine Art programme at Central Saint Martins, combines a constant scrutiny of surface with an impulsive approach to art-making. Existing at the intersection of painting and sculpture, Dixon embraces abstraction as a freedom from figurative, allowing her to experiment entirely with form and achieving colour combinations only through the dying or staining of favoured fabrics. Keen to not be constrained to the customary confines of a canvas, she opts instead to stretch transparent textiles such as sheer polyester over reclaimed or reconstructed stretcher bars, exposing the inherent sculptural structure of the artwork itself.

Henry Gibbs meanwhile, a fellow BA Fine Art student at Central Saint Martins, creates complex layered compositions that typically start and end with the body. Intertwined limbs sourced from pornographic stills have their eroticism obscured through additive abstraction, the surface stripped with ribbed bands that evoke frenetic Futurist energy as well as the ephemerality of technology and the overwhelming omnipresence of digital imagery. Final detailed line-work delineate softer, sentimental scenes or floral forms, whilst a wolf serves as a stand-in self-portrait, a vulpine alter-ego able to easier express emotions related to the Gibb’s own lived experience of navigating the London gay scene.

Vilte Fuller, who completed her BA in Fine Art Painting and Printmaking at the Glasgow School of Art in 2018, has been enjoying early success with recent solo exhibitions in both London and Paris. Fuller’s paintings, rendered in a sickly sweet palette of grungy green, mouldy maroons and mustard yellows, blend dark humour and swampish surrealism to reflect her Lithuanian lineage and the alienation she experienced after a familial relocation to rural Kent during her juvenescence. Originally initiated in part to logistical limitations restricting the sourcing of art supplies during the pandemic, bold stitching scars the surface of some paintings, as sewn-together scraps of spare canvas form Frankenstein facades.

Choon Min Kim, a recent MFA graduate from Goldsmiths, approaches abstraction as a meditative method of unlearning the more traditional figuration she had previously mastered in her native South Korea. Mi Kim’s paintings avoid easy interpretation as she leads the viewer through a landscape populated with a confident communion between colour and gesture, stereotypical symbols of femininity (a heart or ribbon) and periodic pauses of negative space. With a calligraphic influence evident, her paintings are defined by a combination of both deliberate and intuitive mark-making.

Abi Ola’s artwork currently features in the Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2022 survey exhibition at South London Gallery in Camberwell, after she graduated with an MA from the Slade School of Fine Art last summer. Ola’s mutli-media artworks amalgamate a persistent pursuit of pattern with a therapeutic, repetitive painting process. A combination of pre-existing patterned textiles, often imbued with a personal narrative, alongside the artist’s own painting or screen-printing of recurring emotive motifs intentionally overwhelm the viewer. Amongst the rich abundance of imagery, the addition of mirrored elements allow the viewer to inhabit the artwork themselves and their own quiet moment of reflection.