Talk
Artist Talk: Jonny Green in conversation with Frances Woodley
25 May 2016
Space W10
London, United Kingdom
Wednesday 2-6pm
Thursday - Saturday 11-6pm
and by appointment
Free Admission
Please join us for an exhibition showcasing new works by British painter Jonny Green.
Born 1966, North Yorkshire, United Kingdom. Lives and works in London.
Jonny Green’s paintings are precise renderings of very imprecise, rather expressionistic sculptures. Green’s working process is long and labour intensive, beginning with making miniature sculptural objects fabricated from accumulated everyday and discarded, overlooked objects, such as screws, nails, plasticine and electrical tape. The artist then lives with the pieces, discards or edits them, photographing his few selected pieces then paints them. The point of photography is important in Green’s process as this is the moment where most of the decisions are made in terms of its presentation, reducing the subject from 3 dimension to 2, choosing what will be shown and what will be concealed and the painting process is a documentation of these decisions. Once painted, his objects, once flawed and abject are transformed and take on a monumentality and depth not originally present in their original state. Within his process, Green’s works bring to mind ideas of displacement, otherness, metamorphosis, and the abject and the vulnerable. Green explains his approach as one of chasing the human element within his objects, to tell their story and make their voices heard and validate them. Previously creating the sculptures in a ‘stream of conscious’ working process, Green’s latest works are purposefully directed towards portraiture. His paintings thereby exist as portrait and still life, as anthropomorphized objects crossing over to subject, both animate and inanimate. What we, the viewer are presented with is highly realised pictorially yet intentionally ambiguous, we don’t know what we are looking at, its provenance and what its intention is and it is this ambiguity that challenges us.
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