Juliette Losq
The British artist Juliette Losq places the notion of ‘The Clearing' as central to her practice and imagery – a place where wilderness and chaos oppose civilization and order. She depicts marginal landscapes that hover at the edges of this symbolic Clearing, alluding to the English 'Gothic' of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as typified by fragmented narratives relating mysterious incidents, and scenes that were charged with an imagined threat. Losq conjures her own unique landscapes where we feel at our most safe yet most vulnerable: stray too close to the edge and the forest may snatch you into its depths.
Losq works over the surface repetitively, creating multiple painted layers which simultaneously obscure and reveal those beneath. She often incorporates imagery derived from diverse sources including rococo prints, Victorian newspaper illustrations, and science fiction and horror films. This becomes inextricably woven with the detritus of the areas that she describes. Shifts in scale evoke an uncertain world in which the uncanny can coexist with the mundane, and where the possibility of confronting what has been repressed may generate at once feelings of creeping malevolence or whimsical curiosity. In this world beauty and neglect are interchangeable.
Juliette Losq (b. 1978 London, UK) is an internationally exhibited, prizewinning artist. Losq studied Fine Art at the University of the Arts London (2004- 2007) and the Royal Academy Schools (2007-2010), as well as studying English and History of Art at Newnham College, Cambridge (1997-2000) and History of Art at the Courtauld Institute, London (2000-2001).
Losq won the Jerwood Drawing Prize in 2005, was one of five shortlisted artists for the John Moores Prize in 2014, receiving the Visitor’s Choice Award, and received the John Ruskin Prize in 2019. She was elected to the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours and the Guild of St. George in 2020, as aRoyal West of England Academicianin 2021, and as a Member of the Royal Society of Sculptors in 2022. Losq is included in The Women's Art Collection, The Newnham College Art Collection, All Visual Arts and The Saatchi Collection.
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