03/11 - 17/12/2022

MEMENTO - Darren Lynde Mann / James B. Webster
03.11 - 17.12.2022
Opening 03.11 from 17.00 to 21.30
at Jonathan F. Kugel - Cabinet de Curiosités Contemporain
Rue Watteeu 16 - 1000, Brussels.

Introducing an exhibition of paintings and sculptures from two British artists. 

James B. Webster (b. 1978) and Darren Lynde Mann (b.2001) hail from the same Medieval town of Framlingham in Suffolk on the East coast of England looking over to the Belgium coast. 

Webster curated a show for Lynde Mann early this year and invited him to collaborate with him on a show in Brussels. Webster has been exhibiting in Brussels and represented by Jonathan Kugel for over a decade making this a natural home for this collaboration and for Webster to  curate in Kugel’s gallery. 

Webster finds in Lynde Mann's work a similar response to the classical, especially in Lynde Mann's drawings and paintings of sculpture. His muted pallet and gentle gesturing of individual and small groups of people can be directly related to Webster's collections of concrete mounted porcelain Herma occupying large spaces, as in ‘Martyrs’, from 2019.

 Lynde Mann is a London born painter based in Suffolk. Predominantly self taught, he has drawn on secondary sources of sculpture and old master paintings of religious subjects. He reforms and composes these figures from meticulous detail to a simple outline or silhouette. He paints on to spacious softly coloured ground on his own frames of unprimed cotton canvas, he plays with the gravitas of his figures and compositions with this lightness of touch in his technique.

This will be Lynde Mann’s first exhibition in Brussels and outside of England. after recently being included in the “up and coming artist “ show in Christie’s. Here Lynde Mann has been responding his time spent in Bologna early this year, working on various different formats drawing from first hand observations. Working on a variety of formats then has continued to develop his treatment of the abstract content in the composition, with silhouettes and charcoal line and the scarification of the surface.

Webster, in a partial response to working along side Lynde Mann and a continued personal research in to material, Webster has created a group of sculptures based on the materials he casts from in to porcelain. Wax, terracotta, parrian, wire and plaster. this assemblage of material creates a different narrative in Webster’s work while still holding true to his preoccupation with the classical and the sacred. Webster explores interaction between two individuals and allows the texture and colour of the material to describe the sensation of these 

It’s the first time the gallery gives a Carte Blanche to an artist to curate an exhibition.