Von Racknitz + Baer Gallery is pleased to present Playing and Reality, a two-person exhibition by Arthur Laidlaw and Dan Rees.

The show borrows its title directly from paediatrician and child psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s book Playing and Reality (1971). A key figure in psychoanalysis, Winnicott, emphasised the importance of play in psychological development, particularly in the formation of a stable and creative self.

Play is not simply an activity for children but a lifelong process that enables growth, imagination, and emotional resilience.

What Arthur Laidlaw and Dan Rees attempt to articulate in their own ways is the self-negating nature of images, they do so through an engagement with the mechanical processes familiar to analogue photography; the results are an unexpected and unrepeatable series of nuanced and seductively ‘painted’ surfaces