MEDIA RELEASE COURTESY OF: VITAL ARTS

Vital Arts is delighted to announce the opening of The Garden that you Planted, a collaborative exhibition by internationally-known artists Rowena Dring and Nike Savvas and created especially for the Royal London Hospital and Barts Hospital.

The art of both Rowena Dring and Nike Savvas is rooted in landscape, and since they met at Goldsmiths College of Art in 1996 they have become increasingly intuitive to each others work. The collaborative exhibition, The Garden that you Planted, is inspired by the artists’ shared experience of living in a dilapidated chateau in France in the summer of 2009.

The property, originally a 13th century fortification built upon a Roman temple, has over the centuries been rebuilt and altered, becoming a tapestry of interwoven histories. The rambling parkland, which includes a WWII bunker, has been diminished as large swaths have been lost to encroaching industrialisation and gambling debts? The chateau now faces an uncertain future with plans to build a high speed railway through the property. The faded beauty of the estate and its poetic history—which in many ways runs parallel to modern European historyare at the heart of Dring and Savvas’ collaborative exhibition.

For the Royal London Hospital gallery, Dring and Savvas have created In Towers and Clouds, which combines their individual approaches to landscape and to the grounds around the chateau. The composition of the landscape work is based on Japanese Floating World prints, where clouds part to reveal the world hidden behind them.

Installed at Barts Hospital gallery are a series of wood and woollen string sculptures by Savvas, that echo the experience of viewing the negative spaces between leaves whilst walking in the forest at the chateau. Dring has created a large landscape that hovers between realism and abstraction, taking as its point of departure the chateau gardens.

Gallery addresses: Vital Arts Gallery Space
Out Patients Department - Barts Hospital
West Smithfield
London, EC1A 7BE

Vital Arts Gallery Space
Main Corridor - Royal London Hospital
London, E1 1BB

Exhibition Dates: 12th February - 30th April 2010