As promised back in February I did go to the Chloe Early show at the Outsiders Gallery. This is the first time I've been to this gallery and it is a weird space. The upstairs looks pretty much as you'd expect, apart from having a front door that looks like it belongs to an old-fashioned pub, but the basement consists of two oddly-shaped rooms, one of which you have to duck to get into, with unpainted walls. It basically looks like its owners haven't finished it yet, but it's been there for some years.
The Chloe Early show was as beautiful as I expected. Her paintings of women falling/flying/jumping are full of life and motion. The photographs online don't do them justice at all; in person, the shimmer of metallic paints, the splatters of bright colour and the texture of the brushstrokes give the impression of movement. It's as though these women could plummet back down to earth or escape even higher at any second.
In addition to the paintings there's also a short film playing in the low-ceilinged basement room. It intercuts shots of Early painting with close-ups of swirling washes of paint and shots of her models leaping. Everything is in slow-motion, set to a haunting instrumental soundtrack. Here it's Early herself we see suspended, frozen in the midst of creating these paintings. It's a lovely counterpart to the rest of the exhibition.
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