TRIBE

About

"I like the idea of abstraction being pressurised or pulverised into new forms by worldly 'outside forces'. Collage is like abstract art's naughty little sibling and they have both been around for just over one hundred years in the West. Historically, abstraction has an air of 'higher aims' about it. Collage by contrast has a cheeky, satirical and playful edge (and edges are what my work is all about). Collage allows me to constantly test the limits of what an abstract painting's 'body' can take. I hope to find something like a new hybrid visual grammar in these clashes of materials and forms. By using the most basic materials to hand gleaned from my city streets, I'm destroying and rebuilding paintings as I go. I enjoy forcing the history of abstraction into new and dynamic relationships with life lived." John Bunker 2015.

John Bunker was born in Norwich UK in 1968 and studied 'Art and Social Context' at Dartington College of Arts in Devon where he graduated in 1991. He moved to live and work in London in 1997. Since then he has developed a complex and diverse body of work focusing on the protean and contrary nature of collage. Many divergent objects and painterly techniques coexist in John Bunker's uncanny collagic realm. He infuses the remnants of our urban hinterland with the visual pulse unique to modernist art. The results are absurd yet poised, brutal yet strangely elegant and psychologically charged.