Life Gets Harder, Trackies Grow Thicker

Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: Government Art Collection

This painting in red and white plays on the visual effect of a red Adidas track suit and striped trainers. A small faceless figure clad in this outfit in the centre of the painting expands outwards in a concertinaed Russian-doll type configuration to form other figures in the same tracksuit and trainers, and eventually grows too large to fit fully on the page. Life Gets Harder, Trackies Grow Thicker, the title explains. Hall grew up in London where the track suit or trackies are ubiquitous, particularly on sports grounds and gyms but also on the streets. She plays with the visual elements of colour and line in the apparel to abstract an item that many might consider mundane and everyday, creating a visual composition that draws us in. Her humour and playfulness in applying an art-led lens to this element of popular or street culture extends the vocabulary of abstraction outwards from the gallery to a wider audience.

Winnie Hall graduated with a BA in Fine Art from the Chelsea College of Art in 2020 and was selected for the Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2022, showing work at the New Contemporaries exhibitions in South London Gallery; and Humber Street Gallery and Ferens Art Gallery, Hull that year. She has also shown work in group exhibitions at the Art Hub Deptford; Royal Academy Summer Exhibition; OOF Gallery; Coleman Projects and Campbell Works (all in London in 2023); Changing Room Gallery, Soho, London; Turf Projects Croydon (both 2022); Whitgift Centre, Croydon (2021 and 2022); Platform, Southwark, London (2021); AMP Gallery; Clarendon Yards; and Art Lacuna (all in London in 2019).

Places

Subjects

Materials & Techniques

Artist

Winnie Hall (1998 - )

Title

Life Gets Harder, Trackies Grow Thicker

Date

Medium

Oil on canvas

Dimensions

height: 75 cm; width: 75 cm

Provenance

Purchased from New Contemporaries, January 2023

GAC number

19180