Tarka Russell has long spotlighted extraordinary female artists through her work as a curator and art advisor, and through her collaborations with institutions around the world, including The Glucksman museum in Ireland. Today she is championing the work of Eleanor Johnson, whose first solo with Gillian Jason Gallery, The Feast of Fools, opens on 15 November. She discovered Johnson's wildly irreverent paintings at her graduate show, while she was at City & Guilds of London Art School.
Russell says: "What I find compelling in Eleanor's work is the vibrant explosiveness of her technique and use of colour, which is second to none."
Johnson's densely worked canvases revel in the tension between desire and disgust, the beautiful and the grotesque. For The Feast of Fools she took inspiration from film director Marco Ferrari's 1973 satire La Grande Bouffe, in which a group of friends gorge themselves to death. She riffs on this story to explore notions of excess, power and overindulgence in today's society, through luscious scenes in which writhing bodies seem to fight for attention.
