Band of Skulls bassist Emma Richardson presents first solo London exhibition

Emma Richardson, Band of Skulls’ bass player and vocalist will present her first solo exhibition in the New Year.

The series of paintings were created in response to music by the Southampton three-piece whose debut album Baby Darling Doll Face Honey enjoyed widespread critical acclaim.

They release their second, much-anticipated album, Sweet Sour, in February and this exhibition marks another artistic highlight for Richardson, in a year that looks set to see the band’s meteoric rise continue.

The exhibition in London, February 2012, consists of two groups of works, corresponding to the first two albums by Band Of Skulls. The first series formed the artwork for their debut album, released in 2009, when Richardson’s paintings were photographed and then digitally manipulated to create the cover.

The process was extended and developed for their forthcoming second album, for which Richardson worked with the designer Vincent Toi and the creative team at The PHI Centre in Montreal, Canada, who by turn enlisted glass artists Cédric Ginart and Karina Guevin to make a glass sculpture inspired by Richardson’s paintings. The resulting collaboration was photographed and became the cover image for the album.

Heavily influenced by painting masters including Cy Twombly and Lucian Freud, Richardson’s large-scale abstract paintings exploit the medium of oil on canvas to explore the nature of the human form, whilst making use of the visceral quality of the medium against the rough texture of the linen on which she works.

Richardson’s work is concerned with the ambiguous and the abstract, as well as the nature of symmetry and reflection.

Music is a key part of Richardson’s life, and she acknowledges a strong link between her musical and her artistic outputs, enlisting similar processes of re-working and revisiting until a finished product is reached within both disciplines.

The relationship between the two mediums is a reciprocal marriage of creativity, with the music informing and inspiring her paintings, and the paintings lending the music a visual identity.