Damien
Meade.
day01. is very pleased to present One Painting, an encounter with a single artwork by Damien Meade.
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The result of a slow multi-layered studio process, the portrait Untitled, 2022, is not portraiture in a traditional sense, it doesn’t depict an actual person. What confronts us declares its own artificiality. It is a painting of a thing made in clay by the artist in his studio. But yet we are met by a presence - something arresting, and alert. This something is also a someone. It says “I am this”, and drifts a question to us - “What are you?” Its implausibility reminds us of our own.
In a recent text about Meade’s work, the artist and curator Dan Howard-Birt writes: “Whether the painting is approaching completeness or softly dissolving before us is purposefully unclear. Uncertainty is a gift from the painter to the looker, and it should not be confused with arbitrariness.”
“In Untitled, 2022, the model’s chest and arm seem to have been discovered, rather than constructed, like the way Max Ernst reveals his apocalyptic landscape in Europe After the Rain. As this puckering paint forges contours and so begins to coalesce form, details emerge. As in many of his portraits, the figure wears a cable-knit sweater. Not the cosy knitwear of 1970s suburban hippiedom however, as the stitches are as likely to morph and mutate into scuttling beetles, or slippery fish scales, or chain-mail.”
When confronting Meade’s paintings, Howard-Birt continues, “looking retains the thrill of making.”
April, 2024
Full Catalogue here.
Damien Meade website.
One
Painting.
2 May – 1 June
Exhibition view
Damien Meade
Untitled, 2022
oil on canvas
93 x 54 x 2.5 cm
Damien Meade
Untitled, 2022 (detail)
// Back Room
Damien Meade
Untitled, 2018
oil on canvas
47 x 35 x 2 cm
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Damien Meade
Untitled, 2016
oil on canvas
36.5 x 23.5 x 2 cm
Damien Meade
Untitled (2202), 2018
oil on canvas
47 x 29.5 x 2 cm