PREFACE :
Anima Mundi is delighted to present ‘Poem’, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Joy Wolfenden Brown taking place on two floors of the gallery. ‘Poem’ is Wolfenden Brown’s sixth solo exhibition at Anima Mundi.
This collection of exquisitely intuitive and intimate, small and larger scale oil paintings are imbued with the artists renowned sensitivity to absorb the physical and metaphysical world that surrounds and precedes the present moment. Evocations of fortitude combine with vulnerability resting beneath an ethereally layered and unmannered, yet luminous oily surface. The ritualistic painting process flows continuously from the artists' subconscious, as a visual reflection of deep felt experience and emotion, simultaneously confronting whilst offering the viewer comfort through the sharing of a profound and fragile truth. Figures often appear awkward, perhaps guarded, as if attempting to close the breach created through the wide eyed protagonist, offering a unique and singular window in to the soul of the subject, the artist and in turn, ourselves.
BIOGRAPHY :
Joy Wolfenden Brown is a British artist born in Stamford, Lincolnshire in 1961. She currently lives in Bude, North Cornwall.
Wolfenden Brown’s intimate oil paintings feel hauntingly familiar possessing a raw, emotional, honesty. She captures fleeting fragments of memory, moments in time where the inherent vulnerability of the figures depicted, often in isolation, is palpable. These are lovingly yet spontaneously executed reflections on the human condition, which have an unnervingly, yet simultaneously comforting, unguarded quality.
Joy Wolfenden Brown graduated from Leeds University then completed a post-graduate diploma in Art Therapy at Hertfordshire College of Art & Design. She worked as an art therapist for ten years before moving to Cornwall in 1999. Wolfenden Brown has had a number of sell out solo exhibitions and was the First Prize Winner in The National Open Art Competition, 2012. She was also awarded the Somerville Gallery painting prize in 2003, was first prize winner at the Sherborne Open in 2007 and won the Evolver Prize at the Royal West of England Academy in 2019. Works were acquired by the Anthony Pettullo Outsider Art Collection in Milwaukee with further works held in collections worldwide. Wolfenden Brown has exhibited internationally with six solo exhibitions at Anima Mundi marking a long and fruitful working relationship. Joy Wolfenden Brown is represented by Anima Mundi.