reviews Various

Robert Clark Guardian 13^th Sept. 2008

Helen Baker''s paintings quiver exquisitely on the verge of their own disintegration. Fine grids of resonant colour are built up, distressed, half rebuilt and half left in ruin. This quality of archaeological melancholy was intensified during her 2007 spell at the British School of Rome. Baker refers to these works as "like shrunken Bridget Rileys, frayed and left on the wrong wash cycle". In fact Baker distils Rome''s sunlit surfaces and many-layered excavations into deceptively simple, full-frontal abstractions. Compositions show fault lines and imperfections; miniscule perforations interrupt the regulated rhythms to let in glimmers of history and experience.

· Red Box Gallery, Thu 18 to Oct 30

Robert Clark 13^th June 2009

Helen Baker-Alder takes a rectangular surface and packs it with a mosaic of smaller rectangles. The creativity and visual poetry of her work arises as she fills out these intricate geometric grids with painted variations of tone and colour and texture. It is the very predictability of the repeated overall arrangement that draws one in to a hypnotic contemplation of the subtle changes. Many of the works were inspired by a Rome residency which brought the artist face to face with fragmented mosaics and crumbling frescos. Her images might appear like walls, yet they are walls on to which abstract dreams have been projected.

• Corn Exchange Gallery, to 23 Jul

Helen Baker(-Alder) Pick of the Week 27^th June 2009

Corn Exchange Gallery, Edinburgh

Baker-Alder''s paintings appear like walls on to which abstract dreams have been projected. Pictures to gaze at again and again and drift off into.

David Pollock June 2009 The List

Helen Baker describes her new paintings as resembling ‘shrunken Bridget Rileys, frayed and left on the wrong wash cycle’. It’s a canny comparison. Where Riley’s op-art pieces were born from a precise structural aesthetic, Baker’s mosaic-like pieces look careworn in comparison. Yet they share with Riley’s work an underlying precision in their grid-like construction. While the blocks and dots with which Baker coats her colour-washed canvases (created while on a residency in Rome) are minimally abstract in their sensibilities, the colours she uses are complementary to and reflective of nature. Each painting feels like an impressionist landscape, as seen after being blinded by the sun, or witnessed in a reflective pool of water.

Baker uses two distinct forms. The first is on a colour-washed canvas, with distinct blocks of colour painted in sequences which echo square bricks being arranged in an ascending structure. Names such as ‘Block’ and ‘Build’ suggest that there’s some kind of architectural representation at work here, albeit arranged in such a way that a mess of colours and styles comes together to create the coherence of a modern urban landscape. Other pieces use far smaller spots of colour to create a dot-matrix effect on the background wash, with the blue and white on black effect of ‘For Pucci’ and the white and greys on red of ‘For Gucci’ creating the rung-out fabric effect Baker described in reference to Riley. These implicitly suggest that Rome’s status as a centre of fashion commerce might not prove as enduring as its architectural history.

Corn Exchange Gallery, Edinburgh, until Thu 23 Jul

Guardian  Jan 2009

A retrospective to mark the 25th anniversary of the founding of The Newcastle Group and to signal its disbanding due to several members eschewing Tyneside for the cultural climes of Australia and California. Formed during a period when it was still considered essential for UK artists to shift down to London if they were to escape backwater disregard, the group came to represent a northern defiance against the networking conventions of the contemporary art mainstream. Its creative perseverance and ambition has served such members as Helen Baker, Annette Chevalier and Duncan Newton (work pictured) in good international stead ever since.

Guardian  14^thMarch 2009

Curator Helen Baker is swiftly establishing Northumbria University''s Gallery North as a focus of creative reflection on a series of revealing themes. Here we have a broad look at the widespread use of visual narratives, a trend that would have seemed unthinkable during the long decades of purist modernism, minimalism and conceptualism. The storytelling here tends to follow a distinctly unnerving drift, with Christina Kolaiti''s phototherapy medical fantasies and Francesca Steele''s study of a levitating woman. A highlight will be Emma Talbot''s recent plaintive and exquisitely touching paintings, in which autobiographical intimations are intermixed with wayward reveries.

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