Art Gallery

We have devoted the rear part of our shop to create a homely and relaxing area which will also be used to display exhibitions by up-and-coming artists. Feel free to pop in and see what's on show!

Zachary Peirce – Chernobyl Exclusion Zone

Our first exhibition comprises selected paintings and linocut prints by the artist Zachary Peirce from a lengthy body of work on the subject of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, an area he visited in 2009.

25 years on, Chernobyl stands as a permanent reminder to the world of what can happen when nuclear power goes wrong. It is now one the most radioactive regions on the planet with parts that will remain uninhabitable for over 700,000 years. But it also exists, paradoxically, as a place of strange and unexpected beauty. A place where wildlife is apparently thriving (the 30km exclusion zone around the power plant is now Europe’s largest nature sanctuary). A region returning to an era before humans, a land of forests and wolves.

The workers’ town, Pripyat, has become a modern Pompeii. The hastily abandoned Soviet buildings are now frozen in time as radioactive animals move in, radioactive trees grow inside and the concrete slowly crumbles.

…has an architectonic splendour crossed with a mood of decay and threat.
Financial Times

Peirce’s linocut work shows derelict high rises and ominous skies in luminous colours, starkly contrasted by the skeletal silhouettes of black trees and branches. The paintings are highly textured, a result of the artist’s use of a palette knife to apply paint. They show washed-out buildings with seemingly melting edges. Beautiful, yet toxic-looking, both linocuts and paintings almost ooze radioactivity.
Lancet Oncology

In contrast to the fairy-castle appearance of Godlieb’s post-human architecture, Zachary Peirce’s painting of “Pripyat, Chernobyl Exclusion Zone” bleaches the colours out of the natural landscape, leaving washed-out pinks, bruise purples and a colour the same yellow tone as human skin. A slight touch of green appears murky and poisonous. In the background there is a building that appears to be melting: the black outlines drip down the canvas into the overgrowth. Here the impact of humanity’s failings on nature has created a dirty, deserted area without any of the peace of Godlieb’s twilight scene.
Amalia's Magazine