Luke George and Elizabeth Rose: MADDER, Griffin Gallery

The Griffin Gallery’s exhibition, Madder, presents works from the latest winners of the Griffin Art Prize - the artist duo and couple, Luke George and Elizabeth Rose. Over their six month residency at the Griffin Gallery, George and Rose’s experiments with the traditional madder pigment have created astonishing results in which the very process of creating madder has become the basis for a series of paintings. While you’ll come for the intriguing craftsmanship of how pigment is made, you’ll stay for the thrilling cracked undercoats and explosions of paint on canvas, and the beautiful crystallised texture of madder.  Curator Becca Pelly-Fry explains, ‘visitors will leave having been physically and visually immersed in the delicate beauty of rose madder, just as George and Rose have been in creating this exhibition’. 
The Griffin Gallery
West London’s newest exhibition space, the Griffin Gallery, promotes emerging artists and craftsmanship across all contemporary art forms. Interestingly the gallery operates alongside ColArt, the brand which manages power-house producers of materials like Winsor & Newton, Liquitex and Conté à Paris. The enormous modern building also houses two studios where winners of the Griffin Art Prize are able to take up short and long term residencies, and experiment with the wealth of materials and knowledge in the ColArt laboratory next door. Make sure you look out for the gallery’s calendar of increasingly interactive events which make full use of the in-house knowledge of art materials.  
What is madder?
Rose madder was first developed by the chemist George Field in 1804 for the iconic British painter J.M.W. Turner who was complaining that he could not find a suitable vivid shade of pink. Field was able to manufacture a long lasting colour from an arduous 13 week process which turned the soluble madder plant extract into a solid, insoluble pigment. Such was the quality of madder that Winsor & Newton bought the entire enterprise in 1835.