Sorcha Dallas

Rearrange your face, with its simple, punchy title, is a varied and painterly show exploring the theme of abstracting figuration as a common starting point for contemporary art. With comical disproportionate chairs made from wheelie bins and skilfully deconstructed portraits in earthy oils, the show presents three artists’ unique styles and interpretations of the human form.

Michael Bauer stands out most as an artist versed in the use of oil-based mediums, creating post-cubist pieces that visually explore texture and facial features using richly glossed colours.

Juxtaposing these shifting portraits is Charlie Hammond’s Sweat Painting series, which, at first glance, appears to lift much from Philip Guston’s burly male workers. The images soon adopt their own cartoonish language, however, depicting the sweat-stained armpits of angular bin men and toilers (aptly re-titled ‘Th£ Toil€rs’ and, descriptively, ‘Left Pit’).

Lastly, Gabriel Hartley shapes sharp paper and resin sculptures thinly crumpled onto coloured podiums, invoking dead monuments or mouldy old structures, while his paintings, though colourful and textured, depicting birds-eye-view bathers idolising a by-gone modernism, seem too drenched in the art history they feed from.