Trying to make a name and, more importantly, a living as a fledgling artist is notoriously hard so support and interest from gallery owners can be a real lifeline. The Hannah Barry gallery, housed in an ex-warehouse in Peckham which I visited a couple of months ago, is devoted to exhibiting and promoting work by new, often young artists. The Camden Art Gallery (CAG) has a rather more conventional setting in Chalk Farm Road but its owner Rose Marie Bellemur is just as keen to support new artists as they develop their ideas and techniques.

Like Hannah Barry and perhaps reflecting her French/Argentine background Bellemur’s nose for new art is decidedly international. The current exhibition at CAG features six artists from six different countries, spanning the globe from Mexico to Russia.

I spoke to Patricia Chamberlain, Britain’s representative via Coventry, at the exhibition. Chamberlain’s work includes a large multi-coloured oil painting and a series of smaller black and white etchings, all strongly geometric with a touch of Russian constructivism about them.

Chamberlain says a lot of her work relates to “the management and control of space and land”. I became hypnotised by a row of five etchings which use a bullseye as their central motif and gradually become more complex, at least if viewed from left to right in Latin alphabet style. The bullseye expands, adding more rings like a tree growing and becoming scarified, criss-crossed by different shape and patterns. To me it looked like the results of a medical test, a symbolic print out of what happens when we read, our eye moving across the page and drawing in ideas from the text, a jostle of fact and opinion.

In one of those ‘pin the tail on the donkey blindfold’ moments which often happen when abstract art is discussed Chamberlain told me that her bullseye series actually grew out of her fascination with the “construction and deconstruction of tunnels” between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. The bullseye/tunnel represents a whole underground economy that waxes and wanes according to the politics played out at ground level – the shaping of space by ideology.

Dominating the wall facing Chamberlain’s etchings is ‘Model’, a triptych by Russian artist Robert Nizamov. The paintings are Impressionist in style, the paint mostly applied is short daubs like brightly coloured tadpoles. From this mosaic the ‘model’ in each picture emerges. Influenced by Andrew Graham Dixon’s series on Russian art I decided each model woman represented a different era of Russian history, moving from a woman with the large eyes and steady gaze found in icons (see above) to a red haired flapper via an eighteenth century-type figure with a powdered wig. There is a nice contrast between the shadowy face of the icon woman and the flapper who seems to be entirely a creature of light, the paint in this picture sometimes breaking up to reveal trickles of white canvas so she seems to be lit up from behind.

Other pieces in this small exhibition include a sculpture by Canadian Ken Macklin and pictures created by applying oil paint to magnetic foam by Mexican painter Francisco Agraz. Henriette Sonne, born in Denmark and living in Norway, taps into the British love of a bargain with ‘Buy two and get one half price’, a series of small square canvases arranged rather appropriately like the number pads on a calculator. In the centre of each canvas, just where your fingers would hit a keypad and wear away the numbers, is a mangled dollar bill, folded, twisted and crumpled like financial origami.

This very international exhibition will run at CAG until 21st May. If you visit and want to find out more about any of the featured artists there is a good chance you will be able to speak to Amandine Mocholi, the gallery’s Assistant Director who helped to put this exhibition together and ensure a lot of the pieces made it to London from halfway round the world.

Image: Model by Robert Nizamov oil on canvas © Robert Nizamov