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5/5/2003

Merlin James

Andrew Mummery Gallery, London

The Andrew Mummery Gallery is pleased to present new paintings and drawing by Merlin James, reflecting several aspects of his practice.

James's shifting repertoire of imagery includes landscape, figuration (sometimes sexual), apparent abstraction, and transcription from earlier artists. A recent group of paintings also draws from 19th century documentary photographs.

Graduating from the Royal College in 1986, James both anticipated and influenced certain cryptic, antiheroic trends in much current painting. However his work is set apart, not least by highly evolved formal and pictorial concerns and a complex relationship to tradition and innovation.

Neither a calculated, postmodern makeover of styles, nor a willfully naive post-Theory 'bedroom' painting, James' work engages the viewer with varying degrees of representation and comprehensibility; diversity of structure, texture, colour and painterly handwriting; play with convention; evocation of mood; control of association and allusion. The borderlines of what we can recognise in (and what we can recognise as) one of his paintings, is continually tested. Artist's intention and viewer's interpretation are repeatedly put into question, in works which nonetheless hazard meaning, beauty and an account of human experience of the world.

Merlin James was born in Cardiff in 1960. He studied at the Central School of Art, London (1979-82) and at the Royal College of Art, London (1983-86). He held the Alex Katz Chair of Painting at the Cooper Union School of Painting, New York in 2002. He lives and works in London and Cardiff.

In the Image: 'Island', 2001

Private View 6th May 6pm - 8:30pm

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Forthcoming
Hemington - Nakao 11 June - 12 July

Andrew Mummery Gallery
63 Compton Street
London

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