Selma Parlour

'My paintings are meticulously rendered through soft films of oil on linen to look as though they are drawn, dyed or printed. My interest is in painting's in extrinsic conventions and the technical problems of the medium. Central to my invented vocabulary are: the frame, flatness, surface,transparency, trompe l'oeil illusion, bands and units of isolated colour, repetition (with variation and displacement), frontality and the singularly-framed and fixed view, and the re-presentation of art and context. The paintings are effectively diagrams or templates; illusion is codified through shaded bands and colour is in-laid as if through a process of marquetry. Colour is a veil (not a skin). The literal transparency of colour borrows from the white primer beneath so that colour glows as if lit from behind. This backlit quality is reminiscent of the screen and photograph. The analogue apes the digital; whilst the space of painting is imagined as a two-dimensional stage space that curtails fictive distance as it represents it.’ ...

Pi Artworks is an international contemporary art gallery with spaces in London and Istanbul. Its mission is to offer a diverse and active programme that initiates social change. Pi Artworks was founded in Istanbul in 1998. By moving to London in 2013, Pi Artworks wanted to make connections, explore “shared histories”, and bridge artists from different geographies. Pi Artworks London is located in Fitzrovia in the heart of London's West End. Pi Artworks Istanbul gallery relocated to PIyalepasa in close proximity to Arter Museum, with a 350 sq mt. space designed by Polat Group. Since its inception, the gallery has worked with emerging and established artists with the aim of allowing their work to grow in terms of new projects and exhibitions. Pi Artworks now represents a total of eighteen international artists, two-thirds of whom are female. The gallery is also a member of London Collective, and IGA (International Galleries Alliance). ...