Paul Winstanley: Paintings 1989 – 2007

Curated by Brian Butler

ARTSPACE was proud to present the first survey exhibition of the work of British artist Paul Winstanley. The exhibition included a group of paintings from a Red Mansion Foundation exchange programme in China and a selection of paintings from 1989 to 2007.

Deriving from photographs he had taken himself, Winstanley’s paintings deal with the experience of looking. The architecture of vacant spaces such as waiting rooms, lecture halls, never-ending walkways are repeatedly revisited.

“The achievement of Winstanley’s paintings [...] is that he embeds this act of looking and the stages of unseeing within the work. This in turn produces a secondary level of conflation between the image and its reading. They cannot thereafter be separated. [...] The ‘repeated’ image might be simultaneous or consequential, but each make demands of readability upon the other.”, said Andrew Renton in his essay in the forthcoming book Paul Winstanley: Threshold.

Christel Fricke said, “One way to understand why the art of painting has survived the invention of new techniques for the production of images is to contemplate the works of Winstanley and to think about what these embodied images are and what effect they have on the viewer.”

Paul Winstanley lives and works in London. His paintings are widely held in international collections including the Tate Collection, The British Council, MOCA Los Angeles, Irish Museum of Modern Art. He exhibits regularly at galleries around the world. Solo exhibitions include Annexe, Art Now, Tate Gallery, London, 1997, Driven Landscapes, Camden Arts Centre, London, 1993. Group exhibitions include Inside Architecture, MOCA Los Angeles, 2008, Munch Revisited, Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund, Germany, 2005, Flashback, Kunstverein Freiburg, Germany, 2004, Watery, Domestic, The Renaissance Society, Chicago, 2002.

Paul Winstanley: Threshold, a substantial 144-page full colour catalogue with texts by Andrew Renton, Director of Curating at Goldsmiths, University of London and Christel Fricke, Professor of Philosophy, University of Oslo, is available from ARTSPACE and Clouds.
Edited by Brian Butler
April 2008
ISBN: 978-0-9582804-4-0

Further information on the artist can be found here