Now Showing

Eleven is delighted to present The Pool, an exhibition of new paintings by Natasha Kissell.

The Pool is a collection of paintings evoking a life of leisure and endless summers. Kissell lived her first eight years in South Africa where, as Hockney found in LA, swimming pools were not for the super wealthy but were widely owned and enjoyed. Where Hockney represented the beautiful young male lounging by his pools, Kissell’s are markedly lacking the human form (with the exception of Diving In). The nostalgia she feels for her home country is played out in these utopian worlds, ideal escapes, better perhaps in the mind’s eye or memory. They also fit well in the Impressionist tradition where for the first time modern life meant that leisure time was available to not just the rich but the working classes who could enjoy the banks of the Seine or the public parks, picnicking and sitting in the sun. Similarly, Kissell points to a world where leisure and escape is part of society, a right, an ideal and something to be sought after.

As is consistent with her work, Kissell’s paintings are often imagined as she marries architectural features with rural landscapes. In The Splash, a loch, Glen Garry in the Highlands of Scotland, lays before us, snow covered and glistening and in it Kissell places an imaginary pool and loungers, inviting us in.

Natasha Kissell has exhibited extensively worldwide, and her work is in the collections of, amongst others, HSBC, Deutsche Bank, the Saatchi Collection, the Ovitz Family Collection, the Soho House Collection and Knoxville Museum of Art.