Christiana Spens – Closing party 26th June

Saturday 26th June – 6.30- 1.30

LIVED IN BARS   Paintings, prints and drawings

Christiana Spens

LIVED IN BARS is a celebration of pub and club culture, and a reflection on the effects of its loss for over a year. While Christiana began this series of paintings, drawings and prints just before lockdown, in an attempt to capture the social dynamics and relationships at play in familiar nocturnal environments, the social distancing regulations of 2020 gave this pub-centered work an unexpectedly nostalgic element, which she then developed further in new works created since. Exploring the desires to be amongst other people, to escape into a crowd, or to find a melancholic corner of a pub, these artworks record the human need to be social, and the structures, experiences and situations that can block those connections. They also explore the yearning for these experiences when they are not available, with a series of works depicting figures living in beds, rather than bars, missing out on imagined parties, people, and possibilities.  

The Underworld Cafe 2020

Bio:  Christiana Spens grew up in Fife, Scotland and now lives in London. She works across writing, painting and illustration, contributing regularly to publications such as The Irish Times, Art Quarterly, Studio International, Aeon+Psyche and Prospect as a critic and essayist. Christiana’s drawings, meanwhile, have been featured in Dazed & Confused, Vice, Five Dials, the Independent, Flux Magazine, Brenda Magazine, The New Criterion, New Dublin Press, 3:AM Magazine and The Honest Ulsterman. She has also designed book covers for the NYRB’s Classics Series and Dodo Ink’s Trauma anthology (2021), as well as illustrating The Repeater Book of the Occult (2021) and in the past, her own books Shooting Hipsters (2016) and The Socialite Manifesto (2009).

The wait 2020