PAUL WINSTANLEY

Paul Winstanley speaks directly to our human condition in a post-war period. His paintings are familiar places built in a time of hope for a future of social order and prosperity. These walkways, waiting rooms, TV lounges, lobbies are the in between places. They are the places we don’t think about on our way to utopia and, yet, they are part of our cultural and emotional heritage in a post-modern world. Winstanley sees the paintings as archetypes, as keys to both personal and collective memory. In these in between places we are invited to see the ultimate or distilled expression of a broader common experience of the contemporary world.

For the exhibition Republic Winstanley presents us with a new group of paintings exploring his recent visit to China. The notion of art and travel has been a rite of passage for centuries, standardized by artists such as William Turner who embarked upon the ‘Grand Tour’ of Europe in the mid-1800’s. Without the usual frames of reference the sense of being an outsider is heightened. Experiences become fragmentary and non hierarchical. For Winstanley a corner of the hotel room is as important as a view across the mountains. The images collected become the raw subject material and in the subsequent process of painting, image and memory are conflated. Whether this is a reflection of a place visited or a reflection of the artist is a question almost impossible to answer. However, Winstanley emphasizes that wedged within the space of this dilemma is art!

In 2005, Catherine Kinley, former senior curator at the Tate invited Winstanley to participate in the exchange program “Building Bridges.” Winstanley worked and lectured at the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing. The paintings in Republic will travel to China and be featured in the “Building Bridges” exhibition in Beijing opening fall of 2008.

Paul Winstanley was born in 1954 in Manchester, England; he works and lives in London. His recent exhibitions include Roche Court, the Kerlin Gallery, Dublin and Gallerie Munro, Hamburg. His work is represented in numerous public and private collections, including the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Gallery, the British Council, the European Parliament, the New York City Public Library and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.