Paul Winstanley, Arcadia

About

Kerlin Gallery is excited to present a new exhibition by Paul Winstanley. Titled Arcadia, suggesting ‘something ancient being revisited’, this new body of paintings looks towards early 19th-century paintings of mountainous landscapes and their relationship to notions of ‘the sublime’. Revisiting and reinventing this genre from a contemporary standpoint, the artist strips back detail, instead tuning into atmosphere, presence, and spiritual charge. Removed from the specificity of place, his landscapes are transformed into shimmering mirages with soft focus and parched tones, inviting us to consider how pictures mythologise reality.

Initially trained as an abstract and minimalist painter in the 1970s, Winstanley reversed the usual trend of 20th-century artists by moving towards a more representational practice. Yet his approach to figuration absorbs the language of minimalism, continuing to explore the elemental qualities of light and space, and their relationship to the object. Bringing this contemporary approach to the ostensibly traditional genres of landscape, interior, still life and figure, Winstanley creates conceptually rigorous work in which the relationship between the viewer and the painting is central. He looks towards the history of Northern European painting, from the intimacy and asceticism of Vermeer to the romanticism of Caspar David Friedrich, as well as more conceptual figures like Richard Hamilton, cultivating a sense of atmosphere, harmony and pictorial organisation.

Winstanley has exhibited at museums around the world, including Renaissance Gallery, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis; New Orleans Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Tate, Hayward Gallery, Barbican Centre, Whitechapel Gallery, Royal Academy, all London; Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge; Fondation del’Hermitage, Lausanne; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg; Kunstverein Freiburg; Kunstraum, Potsdam; Museum of Modern Art, Rome; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Crawford Art Gallery, Cork; Today Art Museum, Beijing; Artspace, Auckland and Museu de Arte de São Paolo.

For further information and high-res image requests, please contact Rosa Abbott, rosa@kerlin.ie.