Frieze London (Focus): Georgina Hill

City Lights

9—13 October 2024

South Parade is pleased to present City Lights, a solo booth by Georgina Hill at Frieze Focus, London, 2024.

In City Lights, Georgina Hill addresses ‘the city’, its circuit boards of social constellations, of connectivity - or disjuncture - through architectural and domestic frameworks with dynamic abstracted symbolism. 

One watches the cityscape’s gradual animation intently through stained glass framing, as though searching this cityscape from a window - of flat, office, pub partition. A skyline of tonally varied grids, enlivened with a glow from within, as though candlelight or street lamp surge. The materials - glass, metal, wood, and paper - converge between generations. Narratives to decode between supply chains of commerce and chains of dialogue.  

Comprised of wall-mounted and elevated glass boxes, each moment contains information and imagery shaped with intimacy and affect. From creation to finalised exhibition, Hill explores the interconnectedness between humans, objects and place, infusing value and memory through objects often addressed as ubiquitous, quotidian. 

Scenes from the cityscape stand upon supports of perspex and wood, echoing that of the museum vitrine, beguiling. Positing the interior space of the museum with the exteriority of the neighbouring street or of life itself. Glass box as portal as ‘screen-building.’ Where street and interior are seemingly one, historical time is broken up into kaleidoscopic distractions and momentary come-ons, myriad displays of ephemera, the ghosts of material things - of the times embedded in the spaces of things. Such works embrace ‘craft’ and ‘conceptual’ practices, and elevate the complexity and criticality within craftsmanship through technically-ambitious making and cleverly utilised repetition of forms.  

In Modern Grid, panels of blush pink, blue and grey adorn a clear acrylic base - an abstracted portrait, at once a re-imagined Victorian vignette or saturated profile of modernity. The stained glass mosaic feels close to that of a knitting pattern, speaking to how patterns in fashion operate not only as an adornment of the body but act as the body of society, a formalism of design, of construction. 

Overlooking more of the constructed cityscape, Hill inspires feeling, from sentiments of collectivism to solitude - the feeling of waiting before a gathering at Counter top, before friends and strangers come. Green, pink and champagne in Drink Cabinet. Such use of colour palette and light harkens to Hill’s previous solo show, Bread and wine, signalling to the public house. Pub signage and structural divisions laced with glass and lead; clasps of tools on a construction site to the clasp around a hand-torch. Labour of the populous, their essence the city’s foundation. 

Hill continues to enlarge, blur and reduce into pixel form her world’s imagery, expanding the boundaries of iconography. A ribbon-bound box sits in white, red, and gold - a gift. Between public offering and private, from the maker, to giver, to receiver. Apparent delicacy from this feminine domesticity, into the realms of mass consumerism and production. This arrangement of colours and shapes initially strikes as a gift-wrapped box, but from another angle presents the horizontal facade of The Centre Pompidou. Carcass of inside-outside architecture. Madder and saffron tubing reminders of its endless pedestrian channels divided only by a clear pane; people witnessed across both sides as live components in a spherical-cuboidal capital. 

Circulating the panorama further, a palette emerges of pale grey to charcoal, green and red - London letterbox. Abstracted views of pavement, figures passing through to deliver accounts. Domestic and outside realms hold the other, topographical elevation and design. 

En route, newspaper clippings wrap a nest-like structure, concrete poetry of news articles diffused and woven, the fabric of society. This newsprint presentation, Nativity scene in Bardonecchia, embodies an arcade’s display, drawing one closer like a flickering fire. This dressed window, soft against surrounding regimented lines of the cityscape, contains translucent orbs among hay, glowing. As viewers, one embraces the warmth within the grid; life in the curvature of wine flute, pipe works and nest. Among Hill’s sentimental and inquisitive landscape, one senses a pulse brightening then fading, the city lights beaming. 

Text by Lucy Rose Cunningham

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Georgina Hill is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans sculpture, text, and moving image, challenging mediums’ use and form, mapping social structures through material relations. The constraints of such practices are moved beyond; the power of imagination realised; the potential of a material language opened up.

Recent solo/two person exhibitions include Night Friends, madame leniou, Athens (Greece, 2024), Bread and wine, South Parade, London (UK, 2024), Artissima, South Parade, Turin (Italy, 2023), Mystery Box, New Toni, Berlin (Germany, 2022) and In a cowslip’s bell I lie, fluent, Santander (Spain, 2022). Recent group exhibitions include Channel, CACN Centre d’art Nimes, Nimes (France, 2024), Dioramas & the Director’s Anchor, Sessions Arts Club, London (UK, 2024), esta luz, tóxica (Il movimiento), Belmonte, Madrid (Spain, 2023), Flower in the wind, Belmacz, London (UK, 2023), For the hell of it, Atelier d’artistes de la Ville de Marseille (France, 2023), and Unmoored, Adrift, Ashore, Or Gallery, Vancouver (Canada, 2022).

Beyond exhibitions, Georgina is actively involved in screenings and publications. Recent screenings include Unmoored, Adrift, Ashore organised by Or Gallery, Emily Carr University, and Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2022); Speculor at L’ENSAV La Cambre & L’Université Libre de Bruxelles (2021); Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism (2019). Publications include LifeBody, Death of Workers While Building Skyscrapers (2022) and forthcoming Hill Glass Studio, published by Éditions Lutanie in 2025.