The Cat Street Gallery is thrilled to present TOURIST, the first solo show in Hong Kong by British artist, Melanie Comber. Comber’s latest body of work features 12 paintings, each displaying the artist’s recognisable skill for applying paint and pigment to canvas, carving enigmatic perspective and spaces into her two-dimensional surfaces.
Comber’s palpably textural artworks were first seen here in Hong Kong, to great acclaim, as part of the ‘The British Cut’ group show in May 2012. The artist has continued to explore notions of spatial focus, toying with scale and distance as she layers and carves into paint, and dusts the surface with powdery pigment. Often appearing as aerial views of anonymous landscape - like the surface of the moon - or conversely, magnified microscopic matter - Comber’s works are both ethereal and bold renderings of abstracted landscapes.
This latest show, TOURIST, draws on its title’s literal meaning: (n), a person who travels for pleasure, as Comber channels her own experiences - searching for uncharted land, or mining her memory for places she once saw. As viewers, we are tourists, exploring her vision and absorbing her pictorial windows of depth - as if gazing through a lens, searching for a focus point. As Comber investigates the notion of map-making and aerial photography, she explores the premise that reality can be modelled in ways which communicate spatial information effectively - allowing an area which exists in three dimensions to become a symbolic depiction in two - and creating her own monuments to emotional experience.
Born in 1970, Melanie Comber graduated from Wimbledon School of Art in 1993 with a BA in Fine Art Painting and from Chelsea College of Art in 1994 with an MA in the same subject. She has exhibited extensively across the UK since 1993, including in the Royal Academy Summer Show in 2011. In 2010 the artist was a finalist in the Marmite Art Prize and her work featured in the UK touring exhibition. Her artworks have been acquired by numerous private collectors and institutions, including Deustche Bank, Coutts, RBS, Hiscox, The David Roberts Foundation and Sainsburys.
