Kerlin Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Merlin James in OVR:2020, the upcoming edition of Art Basel's Online Viewing Rooms.
Merlin James' intensively worked and generally small-scale canvases encompass a wide variety of subject matter including empty interiors, rural landscapes, architecture and, more recently, scenes of sexual intimacy. Often distressed, pierced, cropped or heavily overpainted and sometimes transparent, these works refine and renew many of painting's most time—honoured concerns—genre and narrative, pictorial space, expressive gesture and the emotive resonance of colour and texture. In these latest, highly personal works, James continues the complex pursuit of Western painting, with a fully contemporary consciousness of the modern and postmodern disjunctures of history and culture.
Solo exhibitions include: A View of the Clyde River at Glasgow, A-M-G5, Glasgow, UK (2018); Long Game, OCT Boxes Museum, Shunde & OCT Art and Design Gallery, Shenzhen (both China, 2018); Long Game, CCA Glasgow (2016); Freestyle, Kunstverein Freiburg, Germany (2014); Merlin James, Parasol Unit, London; Signal Box, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (both 2013); and Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2012, 2015). Recent group exhibitions include: Slow Painting, Leeds Art Gallery, UK (2019), The Levinsky Gallery, University of Plymouth, UK (2020); Painting Amongst Other Things, Drill Hall Gallery, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia (2018).