The Real and the Dreamed Become One

Location: Leeds Arts University, Blenheim Wak, Leeds LS2 9AQ

This exhibition is available to view from 10:00am - 4:00pm Monday to Friday by appointment only for external visitors. Please email curatorial@leeds-art.ac.uk to make an appointment. Staff and students are not required to make an appointment.

'The Real and the Dreamed Become One' brings together a body of work by April Virgoe created in response to the architecture of the Rotunda.

'Project for a Curved Wall' is a series of fifteen panels, tilted to ‘correct’ the curve of the wall, forming a series that can be seen in procession, from changing viewpoints. The paintings are made on very thin copper, an alluring material that offers a surface that appears to be only slightly thicker than the layers of paint upon it.

The architectural inferences in the work are fictional and intentionally ambiguous. Any attempt to identify, locate or rationalise space in the paintings is confounded by the use of repetition, reflection, and reversal. The illogical placement of walls, floors and screens structures a series of impossible spaces, suggesting a journey constructed entirely within the space of painting, while still acting as an answer to the real space in which the work is situated.

Both 'Project for a Curved Wall' and the accompanying paintings in the exhibition make use of grids, both in the serialised arrangement of the panels and as a compositional structure that forms the rationale for the individual works. The geometric logic of the grid is played against the soft outlines and gentle rhythms of the painted forms, so that the architecture alluded to gives way to abstraction and the effects of surface. Ultimately, these paintings propose uncertainty as an end point.