Paul Winstanley: Reprise
Cristea Roberts Gallery, London
7 June - 27 July 2024
PAUL WINSTANLEY
Painted Alp 4., 2024
116.4 x 78 cm. Edition of 6
© Paul Winstanley, courtesy of Cristea Roberts Gallery
Cristea Roberts Gallery presents Reprise, an exhibition of new prints and paintings by PAUL WINSTANLEY (b. 1954). Best-known for photorealistic paintings of liminal and transitory spaces, Paul Winstanley’s new body of work re-invents early nineteenth-century paintings of mountainous landscapes.
Paul Winstanley’s new work marks a departure from his previous depictions of empty interiors, such as art school studios, modernist corridors and waiting rooms, to appropriate existing paintings of nature. Interested by the aesthetics of the sublime, which inspired artists and writers from the seventeenth century onwards, Paul Winstanley explores how pictures mythologise reality.
For Reprise, Paul Winstanley appropriates images of existing historical paintings depicting Alpine landscapes of mountains, trees and rushing water and, using processes of wax resist, degrades the images, impacting their perfection and historical authenticity.
“...how you apply the resist, the gesture, whether it’s sprayed on, painted or scraped on...the image is different each time but there is always a shadow of the original image. Details are lost to be replaced with the details of the process; the spots and specks of coagulated ink. The image is abraded, it disintegrates, all sorts of interesting incidents occur, though you can still see the shadows of trees, rocks, water, mountains, all the elements of the image.” - Paul Winstanley
Paul Winstanley incorporates these images into a photogravure process and prints them with re-imagined colour and sense of light. The artist presents eight variations as photogravure prints, five large scale photogravure prints incorporating hand painting and two previously unseen paintings, all originating from this process of decay and reinvention.
By revisiting the making of the artwork and altering its material surface, Paul Winstanley considers his new prints and paintings to be re-enactments that give the work a contemporary urgency and energy. The works, with their hazy and distorted quality, become distanced from their original subject matter, leaving the viewer to imbue the compositions with their own interpretation.
The artist also exhibits The Viewers, 2020-2023, a group of prints based on installation shots of various of his own recent solo shows in which photographs of museum visitors are incorporated into the gallery space creating semi-fictional images.
“I’ve talked about the role of the viewer in my work for years but these actually attempt to picture this, dismember it and reveal some sort of truth through the use of artifice and fiction. And this can also be said of the landscape prints and paintings. They are not quite what they seem.” - Paul Winstanley.
PAUL WINSTANLEY
Paul Winstanley was born in Manchester in 1954. He studied painting at Cardiff College of Art and the Slade School of Art, London. Schooled in the orthodoxies of abstract Modernism, Paul Winstanley spent a decade after college establishing a new visual language, combining the tenets of minimalism with the pictorialism of photography.
Paul Winstanley has been exhibiting internationally since the late 1970s. He won the first prize of the Unilever Award at the Whitechapel Open in 1989, and two years later was artist-in-residence at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge. He has had solo exhibitions in London, Paris, Munich, Hamburg, Madrid, Dublin, New York, Los Angeles and in Auckland, New Zealand.
Paul Winstanley’s work is represented in several important public and private collections in Europe and the United States, including Tate; the British Museum; British Council; Government Art Collection, London; MoMA, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin and Fonds National d’art Contemporain, Paris.
He lives and works in London.
Instagram: @paulwinstanley54
CRISTEA ROBERTS GALLERY
43 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5JG
