Pseudo Public

About

The British artist and designer Mark McClure’s artwork stems from the urban landscape and representations of the built environment, from buildings and structures to lines on the road, the visual language we unconsciously absorb on a daily basis. McClure comes from a background in visual and graphic design and within his practice he successfully straddles disciplines and media his work is abstract in style with bold lines, sharp angles and strong colour palettes reminiscent of the English Vorticists. Through his multi-disciplinary practice, McClure is investigating what constitutes a painting or sculpture and how the artist can re-establish the lost contact between art and society.

Working alongside architects, public art bodies and interior designers McClure creates artworks that explore themes of structure, public spaces and our interaction with the built environment - from bespoke interiors to huge public art works on the sides of buildings and structures from Beirut to London. He introduces a sense of fun and play, inviting us to interact with the monotonous urban background of our daily surroundings.

On entering the gallery, you are met with a site-specific installation. McClure has constructed and built this artwork by playing intuitively with numerous painted shards of wood. Its non-objective composition and its pared down geometry takes an ordinary material and fills the space in a way that challenges our perception of the gallery space, it’s perspective and its function, interacting with the very fabric of the gallery in what can be seen as a playful approach to sculpting.

One of McClure's key interests is the idea of how we interact with artwork in galleries. His three-dimensional wall sculptures invite us to engage and interact with them. These works are multi-faceted, on the surface they appear as static pieces but on closer inspection we are encouraged to touch and play with them. His experimentation with materials has allowed him to create immersive artworks that push the boundaries of how people view and interact with art. Modernist style mosaics splinter before your eyes, laser cut from sheets of plywood the shapes are painted and reconstructed playfully into a two-dimensional picture plane. These dynamic paintings are not only concerned with the formal elements of line, shape and colour but their pure abstraction is suggestive of works by the Cubist Picabia and Bauhaus pioneer Moholy-Nagy.