TOLD: Darina Karpov, Laura Oldfield Ford, Emma Talbot

Hales Gallery is pleased to present TOLD, a group exhibition that presents three artists who reconsider the role of narrative in contemporary painting. Each artist contemplates the nature of narrative and how it could be used and reinvented for a new era. Much of the work alludes to past structures of this genre but resists the smooth passage of the content. In its place, each artist has created their own form of anti-narrative through the use of biographical, subjective and personalised imagery. Disrupting and fragmenting the notion of a singular reading, the artists encourage the viewer to imagine.

Darina Karpov employs the languages of Russian folk tales, Czech and Russian animation and the drama of ballet and theatre design in her richly worked oil paintings, drawings and watercolours. Karpov talks of her work as "a kind of errant or fugitive storytelling rooted in digression." The paintings revel in decorative elements which contrast with suggestions of violence and unrest.