Opening the Gates by Geoff Diego Litherland

About

Geoff Diego Litherland draws us into a future of both hope and anxiety. Weaving together disparate cultural references into portraits, maps and landscapes, he creates an overarching narrative, an invitation to journey into the unknown as explorers of what might be. In these works of fluid beauty and technical bravado Litherland constructs the future from the past, fiction from fact. He sends us out into the stars as settlers of new worlds, where in the face of impending environmental disaster we can start again.

These paintings are not only held together by their underlying narrative of future hope, they are also united through Litherland’s exuberant delight in the possibilities of paint. Like the worlds he portrays that are pregnant with possibility, these paintings reveal paint as a vibrant medium, full of dynamic potential. As abstract marks coalesce into figurative forms before falling away again into luscious layers glinting with light, Litherland gives the viewer an invitation. Come and follow – the future awaits.

Text by Richard Davey

The exhibition will include recent landscape, portrait and octagonal paintings on linen, maps and smaller field studies which are oil on paper as well as recent woodcut prints.