Linda Khatir (Phd Fine Art)

The preliminary title of my PhD thesis is Vital Space: challenges to abstract painting in France during the 1960s and 1970s

 

Throughout the studio research, processes of repetition and undoing lead to works that are open and unreserved, contradictory and playful.  In the midst of making, I stop at a ‘satisfactory’ result or moment.  This moment is recognised only when I am satisfied that the work has abandoned conventional criteria, and as such is satisfyingly incomplete as painting. 

 

 

This incompleteness forces the next stage, where a minor detail becomes the starting point for another work.  The original detail will be remade over and over - a repeating of the same until it vanishes in a cloud of self-similars. This removal of any uniqueness means that the original’s secure position and singular presence is undone, and it soon becomes lost within the psychological impact of the mass.    

 

 

Since 1998, my practice comprises elements that - although small or faint in appearance - come together in contradictions of reserve and extravagance, freeing up a variety of meanings while seeming to have no meaning at all.  Multi-faceted pictorial objects develop out of a series of repeated and cyclical journeys, and works are categorised according to the activities that brought them into being: pierce, twist, stack(and so on).

 

 

These experimental works may be read in relation to the many theories, practices and products that underpin today’s installational or expanded painting; in particular the post-minimalist, object-like paintings produced by small groups of French artists during the late Sixties and early Seventies. 

The aim of my studio research is to arrive at a kind of ‘painting’ that not only quotes these precursors, but also triggers faint cultural memories via unpretentious means.     

 

Selected Exhibitions

 

• 2005, 2006 & 2007 Museo Casa Cavalier Pellanda, Biasca, Switzerland
• 2004, 2005, 2006 & 2007 Fondazione Patrizio Patelli, Locarno, Switzerland
• 2004 Atlantic Artists Space, Bad Homburg Germany
• 2003 Blue Elephant Theatre, Camberwell
• 2003 Torre Abbey, Devon (residency)
• 2002 Eastbourne District General Hospital (commission)
• 2002  Greenway House, Dartmouth (residency)
• 2001 Phoenix Gallery, Brighton
• 2001 Object 57 Manchester
• 2001 Comme Ca! Manchester
• 2001 Space Banana, Birmingham
• 2000 – 2007 Wahle Contemporary Art, Exeter/London/Berlin
• 2000 Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Foods, Exeter
• 2000 The Nunnery, Bow London
• 2000 Stroud House Gallery, Gloucs.
• 2000 Thelma Hulbert Gallery, Honiton