To close his residency, Lawrence Calver (b. 1992, English) will open the doors of his studio in Saint-Paul-de-Vence on Wednesday December 20 from 3 to 6 pm.
Lawrence Calver is known for a large-scale textile practice comprising a variety of reclaimed, recycled and historical fabrics, from cotton silk and linen to suede and wool. Calver’s works are created with a fastidious care for the design and physicality found in abstracted painting balanced with an approach to assemblage that forges a lineage to quilt-making as an art practice.
Calver’s practice arguably operates within the idiom of modernist painting; taking the material support – the canvas or the plane – and sewing, bleaching, stretching or staining fabric to create works that aim to unify abstraction and representation. To further exploit surface tonality and texture, Calver also applies destructive yet performative processes such as submerging a piece of fabric in clay for weeks, allowing time to become a determinant factor in the works’ final state. Often working within a limited, earthy colour palette; Calver revels in the grain of the textiles and the variations in textures through which he conveys an atmosphere and delineation of form.
