Peter Bold and Sherilyn Halligan

View2 Gallery

Reviewed by Minna Alanko

The top floor Ken Martin’s impressive, spacious gallery in Mathew Street is hosting an exhibition of Peter Bold and Sherilyn Halligan’s paintings until June. Ken Martin is a veteran in the art world with his View1 Gallery in Hanover Street. His galleries are private enterprises aiming to exhibit an ‘eclectic mixture of art’, working independently of ruling art bodies. In addition to paintings, Martin intends to exhibit sculptures, furniture and jewellery in View 2.

Both Peter Bold and Sherilyn Halligan are Merseyside artists who studied at the Wirral Metropolitan College. Bold’s collection, named Golden Quarry by Ken Martin, is a delightful display of strong, broken colours and abstract, bulky shapes. Pencilled lines meander across the patterns of colour, and repeated dots of paint bring detail to the structure of each picture. Halligan’s body of work, Passing Through, was inspired by her journey through America, from San Francisco to the mountains of Utah. Her collages capture the stillness of the American plains. Pale colours dominate, but they are interrupted with streaks of brightness and crossing lines. Like Bold’s, Halligan’s style is abstract, but where Bold uses strong splashes of colour, Halligan’s approach is lighter and more precise.

The two collections complement each other well. Bold’s images portray the limited movement of a man-made landscape; Halligan’s the lack of movement in the desert. Both artists convey the almost surprising beauty of two very different environments. There is undeniable grandeur in a vast space of land and in a barren, constructed quarry.