#46 Helene Appel, The Minutes

2 - 21 July

Helene Appel completed a MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, London in 2006. She is represented by The Approach, London. She currently lives and works in London. 

OUTPOST is pleased to present The Minutes, an exhibition of new paintings by Helene Appel.

Appel’s work involves the meticulous depiction of everyday objects within compositions of seemingly accidental events. Arrangements of lettuce leaves, twigs, clock faces and parcel tape in various combinations are painted on raw canvas. Each group of objects appears without context, as if they had been cast aside by some unobserved force. Appel’s painted compositions often display a freedom of form which echoes the gestural marks of abstract expressionism. However, here it is the objects which can form gestures, rather than the Artist’s marks.

For her OUTPOST exhibition Appel’s focus is sharpened as she works to capture minutely observed threads of time. Concentrating on purposeful acts from the domestic realm, her paintings examine laborious tasks such as sweeping, washing and folding by depicting their material agents. The Minutes will include paintings of crumpled sheets, twigs, a sweeping brush, and chopped onions. 

In the presence of each painting and Appel’s concern for detail, we encounter different phases of action and inaction: a forceful movement, a pile of household dust, food waiting to be cooked, all of which allude to an economic process of disintegration, separation, re-inclusion and re-use. By holding still the materials utilised in these processes Appel draws our attention to surface appearance and its overlooked relation to the act of work. Further in the treatment of each canvas in The Minutes, we find present a detailed record of time-spent working.