FRANK CREBER New Paintings "WATER CITY"

About

In 2005 Frank Creber was appointed the official artist in residence until 2012 for Water City, an ambitious regeneration programme centred around a network of local waterways in east London. Extending from the Olympic Park in the north to East India Dock in the south, the East End is once again being subjected to the force of rapid urban renewal aimed at creating a true legacy for east London, both physical and social, which Creber is recording through drawings and paintings.

As an artist with over twenty years experience of working within a community group in a deprived neighbourhood in Bow, Creber is equally committed to making works that explore a deeply urban affair between a new world created in the pursuit of progress and modernity and the community that it is setting out to serve. A community whose optimism is by no means universal because they have seen before that the developers' bulldozers can just as easily destroy the inner-city infrastructure geared to serving local needs.

Creber often allows his imagination to float high above the city looking down on figures in the foreground that cavort on scaffold structures set against a pattern of roads, the Millennium Dome, housing and construction sites of the cityscape below that provide a metaphoric embodiment of individual defiance and bloody-mindedness. They are apart from the turmoil being created around them. Alternatively, he reflects the fears of the community by presenting a city terrorised by the developer; a city in which older buildings and older communities struggle to hold their own against the forces of change.

A key to the relationship that Frank Creber has to the East End and its community lies in his role as Creative Director at the celebrated Bromley by Bow Centre where he was one of the founding artists in 1986. He was born in 1959 and trained at University of Newcastle upon Tyne (B.A in Painting 1981) and Chelsea College of Art (M.A. in Painting 1987) and he has collected a number of prestigious awards: the Herbert Read Fellowship at Chelsea, Barclays Bank Young Painters Award and the Pickering Fellowship at Kingston University.