Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/474298
sensory quality. There is also a deeply personal aspect to this piece. Despite Uglow's previous imagery of an eternal landscape, with this calendar Uglow imparts a sense that days and months pass. Capturing with colour the mood of each collected day, what we see is an inner landscape of memories in an intimate colour diary. As the artist explains, it is "an epitaph to days", in which colour becomes a powerfully evocative and nostalgic language. Similarly, Uglow demands of the viewer a meditative response. With the Mondrian-esque, grid-like compositions, he asks the viewer to consider the relationship between abstraction and the natural world. He simultaneously ensures that we play an active role, completing the horizontals and verticals constructed within each month. As our eyes travel between one day and the next, a seascape emerges within August; a field and sky scene within July. The possibilities are endless within each of the collected panels and Uglow leaves his viewer to piece together each of these coloured fragments to create their own imagined landscapes. With a profound interest in art's histories, Uglow also zooms in on the very act of painting itself. With gestural swirls of thickly applied paint, he builds a relationship with his carefully mixed pigments and colours. Like Gerhard Richter with his colour charts, Uglow is reflecting on the creative process: "All painting is human gesture and contains energy at the point of making…. each work is of its moment, not a collage of days but rather a gesture set in time. A handwritten letter, a moment, which can suspend disbelief, a fragment of vanished beauty". Nevertheless, by manipulating the fluidity of the medium, he brings a lyrical movement to the work with which we are perpetually reminded of the variety of the ever-changing natural world. While January is a month of unhurried contemplation, September is one of change and movement as the contrasting shades play and vibrate against one another. In a manner that has become almost sculptural, Uglow has also endowed each day with a beautiful textural quality, referencing the myriad forms of the abundant British landscape as it grows and metamorphoses over the passing of a year. Connaught Brown is delighted to be showing, in Geoff Uglow's fourth solo exhibition at the gallery, the hugely significant body of work MMXIV.