DEXTER DALWOOD – LONDON PAINTING
2014-12-15The ‘London Paintings’ signal an exciting shift in Dalwood’s formal approach towards a more fluid, personal and interpretative working method. These paintings provoke consideration of how history is painted and how it might continue to be painted. Historical references and quotations are increasingly mediated through the painting process, resulting in images of a world that can never be quite settled upon or interpreted. The paintings refuse to coalesce into a space or place, demanding from the viewer a longer and more involved process of looking. The satisfaction of recognition is denied, instead a space is created whose function – purely through its painted reality – is to produce a strong sense of time, site, memory and history – the very things that make up a sense of place.
Somewhere between the title, the fragments of imagery and the viewer’s subjectivity, each work acquires its meaning.
Moving with ease between the subjective and the specific to create a rich and individual language, Dalwood expertly combines elements from painting’s past to produce something startlingly original in the present: a body of work that continues to re-invigorate and re-invent contemporary history painting.
Opposite – The Thames below Waterloo, 2014
Exhibition runs through to January 24th, 2015
Simon Lee Gallery
12 Berkeley Street
W1J 8DT
London
