Empathy – Angela and Caroline Summerfield

Canwood Gallery are delighted to announce a new exhibition for August – Empathy.

Main gallery: 3^rdAugust to 2^ndSeptember 2018  

Tuesday to Sunday 11am – 4pm

‘EMPATHY’ is the first exhibition, in the UK, which presents contemporary art in relation to Empathy Aesthetics.  It features 32 paintings, prints and sculpture by two British artists, sisters Dr Angela Summerfield and Caroline Summerfield. Their works explore the experience of Empathy in relation to landscape and the human body.

The exhibition sets out to establish a contemporary basis for Empathy Aesthetics through artworks which address the experience of aesthetics and conceptual art practice:  art forms which appeal to both the emotions and our ability to actively regard, reflect and reason. It challenges received ideas concerning emotional content and the experiences of art, which have not fared well in relation to modern and contemporary art history and art criticism, as disciplines predicated on objectivity. Through a process of aesthetic fusion, we can experience dissonance and harmony; beauty and ugliness; trauma and tranquillity; disinterest and pleasure; and visual metaphor, analogy and ambiguity. The exhibition also acknowledges that artists create with an awareness that, in addition to their own artistic intentions, the viewer brings something of themselves, their life-histories, cultural backgrounds, epistemological make-up and sensory awareness. The experience of Empathy Aesthetics can be pleasurable, profound and imaginatively-engaging.  It reaffirms art as a form of creativity (not production) with all the human awareness and sensitivity that this implies.

www.canwoodgallery.org