DAME MARINA WARNER

Luminary is a perfect word to describe Nina Mae Fowler’s sequence of film directors’ portraits. Her subjects are leading lights who aren’t very often in the spotlight, but stay behind the scenes: esteemed film directors, several of them cult idols of the industry, they represent its variety and range – thrillers, animation, documentary, political drama, blockbusters, noir.

CHARLOTTE MARTIN

The FBI’s treatment of Seberg is integral to an understanding of Fowler’s drawings here. Fowler has long been fascinated by the relationship between celebrity and ‘gossip’, a symbiotic and evolving relationship that always seems to represent the prevailing ideals and morals of the day. Gossip is unrivalled in its ability to create and reframe a narrative so simply.

JOHN MAYBURY

The installation - the drawings in particular - bring that bizarre phenomenon of movie Gods and Goddesses back to us now in sharp focus. The elegiac rendering of the mourners, in graphite, possess an extraordinarily cinematic quality. As collage — montage — whatever — the evocation is pure poetry. The beauty of the black and white rendering of each portrait emerging from the inky black of the surround recalling film posters and yet somehow the darkness of grief itself. The strange obsessive theatre of silent mime is frozen in time.