Twenty painters unveiled special pieces featuring staircases at the Art Space Gallery to celebrate its 35th anniversary last week.
The ‘Step & Stair. Celebrating 35 Years’ exhibition was inspired by the spiral staircase at the St Peter’s Street gallery, which was founded in 1986.
“Because of the famous staircase, we thought it would be interesting to make an exhibition that focuses on stairs and steps in modern and contemporary painting,” said Jon Wood, art historian and co-curator of this exhibition.
He and the gallery owner, Michael Richardson, had the idea for the exhibit before the pandemic began in 2020.
According to Richardson, “it was conceived before the first lockdown, but then everything stopped”.
After 18 months of delay, more than 40 paintings are now on show from 3 December 2021 to 20 January 2022.
The artworks convey a wide range of ideas despite portraying the same object: a staircase.
“Sometimes they are about journeys, the mythology of the stairs, ghosts… they are very existentialist sometimes,” said Wood.
One piece, Infinite Ladder (1995), by Howard Eagleston, is an image of a suburban playground that expresses ideas of infinity and metamorphosis.
“I found this playground when my daughter was young, and I was interested in how it would be expressed on a flat surface,” said Eagleston, who explains that the shape of the ladder evokes the infinity symbol.
