Dealing with a metamorphosis of secondary imaging; I am currently working on a series entitled ‘Taking Liberties With The Masters’. They are both a homage and intervention where I playfully interact on bookpages and postcards of other artists’ paintings; then re-present them. Most recently I have been developing this thread to encompass my own photography of sculptures which I then extend by adding painted mediations culminating in new interpretations.

‘Rather than copying, the relation to the past has become increasingly defined, in broad terms, by the process of technical reproduction, and thus by appropriation.’ (John-Paul Stonard)

Many of the paintings I am familiar with or inspired by have come to me through secondary imaging, containing none of the fundamental qualities that encapsulate the originals – namely the hand of the artist. They lack a sense of scale, feel for paint application and contain no feeling of  craft  or  beauty of surface. Through creating new images from the printed reproductions; I am building an intimate relationship with these works, which also brings the viewer up close to consider them both as living paintings and objects. They are mischievously re-contextualised and continue the ongoing conversation between artists throughout art history; questioning both our relationship to art history and to the ownership of these images.

Sasha Bowles lives and works in London and completed her MA at Wimbledon College of Art in 2013. In the past few years she has been selected to exhibit in various opens including: The Crash Open & Photo and Print Open (Charlie Dutton), Discernible (Zeitgeist Arts), Barbican Arts Trust, The Lynn Painter Stainers, The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition (invited artist) and The Discerning Eye (winning the Benton Prize).

In 2014 she was selected for Oriel Davis, The Open West, Future Map and Discerning Eye.  She co-curated and exhibited in ‘Bodies That Matter’ at ArtLacuna and co-produced The Bodies That Matter 3 publication. She also exhibited in a 4-man show ‘A Virtual Topography’, at Husk Gallery.

In 2015 Bowles has exhibited in group exhibitions at Standpoint Gallery, Husk Gallery, Day and Gluckman, The Crypt Gallery, Lubomirov Angus-Hughes and The Display Gallery.

In 2016 she organised & co-curated COUNTER_FITTERS- a site specific exhibition involving 17 artists at the Geddes Gallery, King’s Cross. From March to June she is exhibiting in Complicity, Artifice & Illusion at Collyer Bristow, curated by Rosalind Davis. In May this year she has a solo exhibition doo-plis-i-tee opening at 286 Gallery, London.
Bowles has work in the UAL collection and private collections in Britain, Europe and America.

I am making works to inhabit the two very different spaces at Gallery 286.

Upstairs is a traditional Victorian living room with rich red walls, pictures rails and elaborate mouldings. Within this space I will hang works from my 'Taking Liberties with the Masters' , series; where I intervene with oil paint on bookpages and postcards of Old Master Paintings, such as Frans Hals, Velasquez, Goya and Gainsborough; which are then re-presented in antique frames. The artists I choose to 'intervene' with are all artists I admire for their technical skill and craft. I like to remove or cloak the faces and hands of the portraits and instead concentrate on extending/subverting the folds of cloth, lacy ruffs or ribbons and create new images with new connotations.

Downstairs the space is a contemporary white walled gallery space; within which I will inhabit a 'room construction' formed from old stretcher frames; which once lit will create a further shadow room. The visual allusion of frames joined together references the 'Salon Hangs' , when paintings were hung floor to ceiling in the Academies.