The Poetics of Space - Stephen Thorpe

About

Aberdeen graduate Stephen Thorpe was chosen as The Skinny Award winner at last year's RSA New Contemporaries exhibition. The outcome of his prize is this Showcase and an exhibition, The Poetics of Space, in Edinburgh's Whitespace which opens on 28 April. Working in oil, canvas and expanding foam, Stephen Thorpe creates obsessively immaculate paintings with solid, rough hewn edges that physically emerge from the wall, reminiscent of fragments of antique friezes hacked out, shipped off and redisplayed in a pristine gallery. Their physicality and manner of display touch on ideas of cultural appropriation, while the compositions reveal dreamlike interiors that bend the rules of space and physics. The work in The Poetics of Space is explicitly inspired by the the theories of Gaston Bachelard. Other influences range from the Leipzig School, Neo Rauch and David Schnell, to Hockney to Renaissance painting to the surreal dreamscapes of Inception.