Bruce McLean - Black Garden Paintings

About

The paintings are inspired by the beautiful, vibrant garden his wife Rosy has created at the couple’s home on the Spanish island of Menorca, where the Mediterranean sunlight casts dark shadows through the greenery. The works showcase McLean’s virtuoso technique and dazzling use of colour - hot pinks, cobalt blues, and deep oranges vivid against a dark background.  Monumental in scale the paintings hover somewhere between reality and abstraction with hints of pathways, ponds, flowers, and shrubs. 

McLean considers the garden as a ‘moving sculpture’.  Bursting with foliage and flowers - bamboo, bougainvillea, jasmine, yuccas, palms – the outdoor space is constantly transforming, the powerful Mediterranean light and coastal weather conditions continually creating new forms and patterns. 

McLean has been investigating the condition of sculpture since the late 1960s, creatively interrogating the possibilities and meaning of sculpture in an extraordinary range of media including performance, installation, public art, printmaking, photography, film, ceramics, and painting.   

For McLean the Black Garden paintings are a response to the garden as a physical space, exploring aspects of light and shadow; they are paintings made by a sculptor.  “Everything I do comes from the fact that I am a sculptor, although some of it looks like painting, some of it looks like poetry, some of it looks like dance.”

The idea for the exhibition developed during creative conversations between McLean and his long-standing friend, the late art historian Mel Gooding.  The exhibition is curated by Jeremy Webster, Deputy Director of the Attenborough Arts Centre, with the light-filled open spaces of the galleries providing a fitting venue for the large-scale works. 

Bruce McLean (b. 1944) studied at the Glasgow School of Art from 1961 to 1963, and from 1963 to 1966 at St. Martin's School of Art, London, where he and others rebelled against what appeared to be the formalist academicism of his teachers, including Anthony Caro and Phillip King. In 1965 he abandoned conventional studio production in favour of impermanent sculptures using materials such as water, along with performances of a generally satirical nature directed against the art world. When in 1972 he was offered an exhibition at the Tate Gallery, he opted for a 'retrospective' he titled "King for a Day" which lasted only one day. From the mid-1970s, while continuing to mount occasional performances, McLean has turned increasingly to painting/sculpture and film work. In 1985, McLean won the John Moores Painting Prize. Since retiring from his professorship of painting at the Slade School of Art, he has taken on a large studio in west London where he has been making increasingly large paintings and sculptural film works.