London’s Ed Cross Fine Art Presents Artist Tiffanie Delune’s Debut Solo Show ‘Seeds of Light’

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Ed Cross Fine Art is delighted to present its first solo exhibition with Tiffanie Delune, Seeds of Light, curated by Katherine Finerty. The show runs until 25 March 2020 at The Gramophone Works, 326 Kensal Road, London W10 5BZ.

Seeds of Light introduces a world full of radiant bright colors and evocative abstract shapes teeming with hidden personal memories, mutable senses of cultural belonging, and spiritually charged visions of hope. The materials and ideas brought to life by Delune’s work are at once delicate yet resilient – sewing thread confidently weaves the outlines of dreams, whilst tenderly recycled garbage bags activate charming yet dark childhood stories, remembered with nostalgic mirth. Despite the deeply personal nature of Delune’s work, each painting serves as a jumping-off point, a portal to induce individual interpretation amidst a collective journey. In this world the protective power of painting facilitates a dual movement both inwards and outwards, from deeply buried seeds to swiftly unfolding rays, beaming with aspiration.

This solo presentation brings together a standalone self-portrait, The Bees, alongside three new bodies of works: Childhood Memories, Spirituality, and a special new commission for the Alexandra Cohen Hospital for Women and Newborns in New York. The Childhood Memories series comprises six sizeable works expanding upon Delune’s focus from the past two years on exploring themes of stolen innocence and displaced domesticity. ‘I sublimate traumatic childhood memories, my postcolonial mixed-race background, and the epiphanies of adulthood,’ the artist reflects, ‘by personifying them as magical creatures in colorful exotic flora, playing with angles, flatness, and depths.’

This emancipatory process enables Delune to find beauty and belonging grounded within a complicated family history and collective memory, animating the ashes of a childhood gone by as both a liminal space and tactile surface to forever rise from. Through sanguine eyes a father stealing food and Christmas trees for his family becomes an act of ingenious magic – children piling into the one bed in their mother’s pied-à-terre becomes an intimate adventure. Trauma transforms into triumph. A melancholy ballad segues into a jazzy love song.

These works powerfully exemplify how Delune’s mixed cultural heritage influences her practice: linear and architectural compositions summoned by a Belgian sensibility, fluid sensuous forms inspired by a free-spirited French perspective, and sumptuous agitated colors shaped by fantasies of her Congolese Motherland – all in an enduring diasporic and aesthetic flux.

Tiffanie Delune and curator Katherine Finerty will be in conversation at the gallery from 7 pm on Thursday, March 19th. Arrivals and refreshments from 6 pm; admission free, RSVP essential. The gallery is at Gramophone Works, 326 Kensal Road W10 5BZ The exhibition continues until March 25th. For further information on Ed Cross Art please visit the gallery’s official website.