London Day and Night

(Detail) Rain in Highgate Village:  oil on linen board 40x40cm.
© Eugenia Alekseyev 2021. All rights reserved.

Eugenia Alekseyev, a London-based landscape artist, presents her solo exhibition: London, Day and Night. Featuring urban scenes and the bucolic places of Hampstead Heath, the show is unmistakably local, yet offering a fresh look at familiar places.

Painting within the neo-romanticism tradition, Eugenia uses strong impasto brushstrokes to convey the immediacy of the scene. She opposes what she sees as the rational and rigid process of studio painting preferring to work plein air. Her work is spontaneous and intuitive. Her relationship with her surroundings becomes as important as visual information alone: the raw charge of the rain, the snow and the wind become an integral part of each painting through brushwork, texture and colour.

The subjects of Eugenia’s London paintings alternate between the natural views of the Hampstead Heath and London parks on the one hand, and the more sober urban scenes on the other. This oscillation is not coincidental.

St Paul’s Cathedral. Winter Sunset: oil on composite board 23×30.5cm © Eugenia Alekseyev 2023. All rights reserved.

Urban scenes explore the experience of a lone individual in a metropolis. The city becomes a symbol and a reflection of the society, and the windows of the buildings, often a feature of Eugenia’s paintings, a reflection of its soul: a way to communicate and understand it.

The landscapes stem from strong emotions – they are a spiritual and unashamedly romantic re-creation of an ephemeral, and yet palpably real world: a search for the sublime and an antidote to the accelerating pace of the modern urban life. They are enigmatic and feel both intimate and public; real and dreamy; but always animated and human.

Eugenia Alekseyev is an award-winning professional artist and art educator living and teaching in North London. While living in New York, she studied art at ASLNY. After moving to England, Eugenia began painting plein air on the streets of London to create an emotional bond with her new home. Plein air painting has since become her main form of artistic expression. She has won a number of awards for her work, including best plein air painting in Plein Air Magazine in the US and best painting in the “Picture the Heath” competition by Hampstead School of Art in 2022.

In the Summer Grasses. Hampstead Heath: oil on linen board 30x30cm © Eugenia Alekseyev 2023. All rights reserved.

For further information contact: Eugenia Alekseyev

The Exhibition co-ordinator: Trisha Dale