GORDON PICKEN

New Paintings
6th Oct - 7thNov

Although a figurative artist, this exhibition of new work by Gordon Picken has him depicting buildings in the urban landscape. His out buildings, shacks, apartment blocks and pavilions are weathered and scarred by the vagaries of life. The passage of time is apparent in them. At first the buildings appear banal but the artist here imbues them with symbolic significance.

There are no human figures in this series but their influence is there throughout. Having been drawn to these buildings, the artist has come to see them as something akin to "ready made " monuments. For him, they become metaphors, not just for social themes, but personal and artistic themes too.


In the process of painting this work the artist has become aware of the paradox of paint as illusion and actuality. By depicting markings, designs and paint surfaces made by others, he's had to confront the problem of "a painting within a painting". For instance, to portray the graffiti in these pictures he found the only solution was to actually mimic it in paint himself.

For Gordon each individual panel is a fragment of time and all of these paintings can be assembled and viewed as built pieces.