Paul Winstanley (b. 1954 in Manchester, UK) is best known for his delicate paintings from photographs, which pull beauty from quotidian environs with tactile precision. Wavering between photographic realism and painterly softness, Winstanley’s works call into question the quiet psychology of public and private spaces. The role of the viewer is central to an understanding of Winstanley’s paintings and his occasional use of the figure echoes that active passivity. Engrossed, they watch, look, wait, smoke, phone, text. Schooled in the orthodoxies of abstract Modernism, Winstanley spent a decade after studying at Cardiff College of Art from 1973-76 and the Slade from 1976-78 establishing a new visual language, combining the tenets of minimalism with the pictorialism of photography. His breakthrough showing of the large painting ‘Walkway’ at the Whitechapel Open in 1989 won him the first prize Unilever Award.