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Press ReleaseJames Colman is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings, drawings and objects by Damian and Delaine Le Bas. 'Wanted: Dead or Alive' will be a multi-faceted event combining painted, drawn and embroidered work with sporadic injections of performance and music. The exhibition will mark a celebration of the couple’s struggle towards a pure, unfettered freedom of expression. Delaine and Damian met as art students in Worthing in 1984, marrying soon after. However, they work separately as artists, each of them partaking of a unique and idiosyncratic vision and a raw, intuitive vehemence of expression. Damian Le Bas incorporates into his work imagery from popular culture and meditations on social injustice along with narrative elements deriving from both his partly Huguenot, partly Irish ancestry and from his personal history. As a student at the Royal College of Art, he was percipiently directed towards the Outsider Archive in London; his outrageous, refreshingly unclassifiable yet visionary pictures have since become a key part of the Outsider Art Collection (housed in the Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin). His pictures may be called maps of the soul. Raw Vision magazine has written of his work: 'Damian embroiders the world with myriad eyes, myriad souls… Eyes sprout eyes; heads beget heads in his work.' His human and animal figures are painted in psychedelic force fields of colour; his reiterated eyes and heads most poignantly transfix the viewer. Delaine LeBas’s paintings and sequined embroideries reflect a vibrant sense of colour and patternings, partly inherited from her maternal Romany background. The daring and original juxtapositions of pattern and colour that permeated her experience from childhood onwards, now distinguish her art. Its figuration (often based on moving family ephemera) can appear as exuberantly decorative, or sparely and subtly deliberated. In some of her works, ornately clothed nymphs gaze serenely from planes of elemental colour. By contrast, elsewhere, text savagely scored into the canvas may denote a grievance or a transcendent moment of elation. Delaine Le Bas, born in 1965, studied at Central St. Martin’s School of Art, London. Notes to Editors Damian Le Bas studied at The Royal College of Art in London. During this time the Outsider Archive in London bought his work. His pictures have since become a key part of the Outsider Art Collection (housed in the Museum of Modern Art in Dublin). Delaine Le Bas studied at Central St Martins School of Art in London. Her work transcends the boundaries between painting, sculpture and fashion. She has modelled for Vogue Italia and both her and Damian’s work are in the Outsider Art Museum in Moscow. The exhibition will follow straight after with one of the most important venues for Outsider Art, namely the festival ’Art Singulier’ in Roquevaire- France. Damian and Delaine Le Bas have been selected to participate with six paintings for the show. Raw Vision is a leading journal of Outsider, Self Taught and Visionary Art.
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