Merlin James




Artist: Merlin James
Title: Not titled (Shed)
Materials: Charcoal on Paper
Dimensions: 23 x 32 cm
Date: 2003



James lives and works in Glasgow. His 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, these works refine and renew many of painting's most time-honoured concerns - genre and narrative, pictorial space and expressive gesture, the emotive resonance of colour and texture. His apt description of the painterly project of an admired forebear, Alex Katz (James is also an accomplished and widely published critic), is equally applicable to his own practice, i.e. he continues to play the grand, complex game of Western painting while reflecting a fully contemporary consciousness of the modern and postmodern disjunctures of history and culture.

Solo exhibitions have included shows at the National Gallery, Wales (1995), Kettle's Yard, Cambridge (1996), Andrew Mummery Gallery, London (2003, 2008) and Brent Sikkema Gallery, New York (2002, 2008), as well as Kerlin Gallery (2002, 2008), New York Studio School (2007). In 2007 Merlin James represented Wales at the 52nd Venice Biennale. He has been a visiting lecturer at many universities in Britain and the USA and in 1996 gave the Kingston University Stanley Picker Lecture at the Tate Gallery entitled The Non-Existence of Art Criticism. In 2002 he was the first holder of the Alex Katz Chair in Painting at The Cooper Union, New York. James is represented in many public and private collections worldwide.

In 2010, James received the Scottish Arts Council Visual Artists' Award.


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