In a lot of his paintings Paul Winstanley manages to recreate that eerie feeling one gets of losing ones way in an office block or being the first into the doctor’s waiting room. The spaces seem wrong, not just because they are empty but also because they seem to lack purpose. Winstanley bases his paintings on photographs he takes himself. But, in turning the photographic images into paintings he makes subtle changes as though he has been painting from memory rather than the actuality. The various locations have a mood of dispassionate recording as though all the locations are from the same building or variations on one room.
Read MoreMost of his images are building interiors and these are mainly devoid of a human presence. The interior spaces are bland areas such as waiting rooms and passageways and as viewers we seem to be on the threshed of entering another surreal world, a parallel universe which looks uncannily like our own.
Winstanley was born in 1954 in Manchester. He trained at the Slade School of Fine Art 1976-78, and then at Cardiff College of Art. From 1991-1992 he was the Churchill College Cambridge / Kettles Yard Artist in Residence. He has had numerous solo exhibitions in London, Paris, Munich, Hamburg, New York, Los Angeles and Dublin, including Annexe, in 1997-98, which formed part of the Tate Gallery's Art Now series. In 2008, there was a major retrospective of his work, Paul Winstanley , Survey, 1989-2007 at Artspace in Aukland, New Zealand. His work is represented in several public and private collections, including those of the Tate Gallery, the British Council, the European Parliament, the New York City Public Library and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. He currently lives and works in London
