Close Corners

About

“I remember going to shows and seeing a painting that was 20 feet long—it’s like the 800-pound gorilla that sits wherever it wants to sit. I didn’t want to paint that way, and I decided I would paint at a size that was scaled to my friends’ apartments, that could hang in a three-room walkup tenement on 7th Street. That was the first big decision. I don’t think I would have kept to that for long, except that once I made that decision I discovered how easy it was to put an idea in the world, look at it, and then wipe it off and do something else if it’s no good.”
Thomas Nozkowski

‘Close Corners’ is an exhibition of and about small painting selected by Scott McCracken. The works are diminutive and modest in size, yet they each possess their own shifting internal scale; their own pictorial space which cannot be measured.  We relate to paintings differently depending on their size.  Unlike larger, human-scaled painting which invites entry into itself, where there is a threshold that can be crossed, these works cannot be entered in such a way.  They are mental pictures.  Tactile pictures.  They are the size of heads, of hands and of pages rather than of bodies and windows and walls.  Viewing them at a distance only obscures their material nature and their surface matter.  These paintings require close working.  Close looking.  Their edges contain and their corners are close. 

Turps Gallery, The Chaplin Centre, Taplow House, Thurlow Street, London, SE17 2DG