Concrete Playground

Araby Steen is the first to admit that her work is a little difficult to describe.

In her first show since finishing at the National Art School – who failed to give her a certificate of graduation, although they did remember to award her a prize – Steen will exhibit fifteen oil-on-canvas works as part of her artist residency at the Trophy Room gallery.

While the delicately rendered paintings seem straightforward at first, a closer look will show that the boy in a set of three small canvasses is actually pissing, and that the ibis filling a larger canvas is actually dead.

At the same time, the paintings, all of which were photographs in their first incarnation, sustain softness in their sense of time and place. This contradiction is the closest Steen’s show gets to a theme – unsurprising for a show simply entitled New Work, but a lovely un-surprise all the same.