Scene I: Glen Pudvine, Mug

About

Glen Pudvine is a figurative painter working across themes of identity, existentialism, the everyday, pop culture and medieval and renaissance iconography. Searching for connections between these themes and experiences from the artist’s life, Pudvine hopes to create new motifs that communicate a broader curiosity of who we are and where we are.

“Scene I: Glen Pudvine, Mug” takes the viewer on a journey from celebrated cave paintings to the Surrealism of René Magritte, exploring on the way the veracity and virility of image and index. Many of the paintings in Pudvine’s Scene employ the motif of a mug handle, with the handle itself functioning as a kind of portal throwing the viewer from contemporaneity into prehistory, as evident in a painting such as “Present” (2023). The word ‘mug’ is also slang for a face and in many of these works the artist’s own face is locked in some kind of combat with a series of images – known or imagined – that make up a landscape of his obsessions and anxieties. “Mammal” (2023), for example, has a mug adorned with a familiar online description of an alien cut across an abbreviated portrait of Pudvine’s own pierced ear. Questions of depiction and perspective, time and presence, abound in both their synergy and dissonance.