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copyright Partners & Mucciaccia
Exhibition
Superimposition: Paul Morrison, Barry Reigate, Michael Stubbs and Mark Titchner
15 Jun 2018 – 31 Aug 2018
Event times
Mon-Fri, 10am - 6pm
Sat 11am - 6pm
Cost of entry
Free Admission
Superimposition, a group show featuring four leading contemporary British artists takes its title from the Latin word superimponere, meaning “to place over” or “to place above”.
About
There has been a strong historical impulse towards superimposing in British art. All four of the artists in this exhibition are finding expanded ways to embrace superimposition using the medium of paint.
Paul Morrison, Barry Reigate, Michael Stubbs and Mark Titchner are united by an awareness of the rich tradition of painting in Britain and beyond, plus the will to show the medium is alive and well in the 21st Century.
Michael Stubbs is perhaps closest in outcome to the Pop artists and abstractionists of the 20th Century, piling up riotous fragments and configurations of over-layered colour, whilst simultaneously introducing graphic logos. His preference is for household paints and coloured floor varnishes and to view his paintings is to be involved in a compulsive game of both revealing and hiding buried imagery.
For Mark Titchner – a 2006 Turner prize nominee – superimposition tends to be verbal. He writes phrases and ideas onto his works, duly transforming not just their appearance but their meanings. In numerous, large-scale public projects he might also be said to be superimposing his texts onto the streets – and indeed, people’s lives. Titchner’s words are taken from song lyrics, corporate mission statements and the maxims of revolutionary socialism. The viewer knows that he or she is being asked to ironically respond to them, but quite how and why is never clear.
Barry Reigate’s method is to apply acrylic paint to canvas with an airbrush. His work combines street art aesthetics, merging cartoon characters with disembodied limbs and passages of purist abstraction. Its many elements don’t simply compete for our attention but seem to fight with each other in a race "upwards" to occupy the picture surface.
Finally, Paul Morrison’s striking, black and white paintings find their inspiration in old, topographical engravings and botanical illustrations. Using digital software – and often
scaling up, cropping and/or distorting his source material – he seamlessly combines different elements from different imagery creating a surreal, monochrome universe.
