WILD ENGLAND

About

In his first UK solo exhibition Andrew Curtis combines photographic and painterly techniques to create a series of disquieting portraits of English suburbia. The resulting images reveal a physical and psychological landscape in which the familiar is rendered unaccountably alien. Many of the works include two familiar suburban symbols: the Monkey Puzzle Tree and the Torbay Palm. Now reassuring indicators of conventionality, they were once the exotic decoration of the new Victorian suburbs. Curtis obscures these plants with a layer of black paint so they become unsettling reminders of our colonial past and suggest a ‘Wild England', the lurking menace of unresolved trauma.