LONDON.- SHADOW is a new site-specific installation and the most ambitious work to date for Catherine Story in her first solo exhibition for a public gallery. Commissioned by PEER to respond to its distinctive public-facing exhibition space, SHADOW melds the artist’s long preoccupation with the staging and lighting of 1930s films and Cubism, with a new interest in the dramatic landscape and geometric architecture of North Africa.

Constructed across two thirds of PEER’s ten-metre wide gallery space, SHADOW converges Story’s diverse influences in a precisely illuminated three-dimensional topography of backdrop, painting and sculpture. During the day the installation is open for visitors, but on dark winter evenings it transforms into an enigmatic mise-en-scene with elements of the work creating a playful shape-shift between interior and exterior, film set and streetscape.

Story’s practice explores the intersections of two and three dimensionality, and the space between sculpture and painting, informed by the complex approaches of Cubism and film lighting as pioneered in the early twentieth century by Picasso, Charlie Chaplin, Joseph von Sternberg and other film directors. A recent visit to the Sahara and the epic eighteenth century fortifications used as film sets for Laurence of Arabia and Gladiator, has led to the experimental development of the artist's work for SHADOW.

Based in London, Catherine Story’s work featured in Painting Now: Five Contemporary Artists (Tate Britain, London, 2013) and Recent British Painting (Grimm Gallery, Amsterdam, 2012); and Astoria (2014), Angeles (2012), Cinema (2010) and PYLON (2009), all at Carl Freedman Gallery, London. In 2015 she was awarded an Abbey Fellowship at the British School in Rome. Her work is included in both private and public collections.

In January, SHADOW is accompanied by a short programme of three films curated by Catherine Story, and introduced by specialists of early cinema.