Artist: Merlin James
Title: Not titled (Shed)
Materials: Charcoal on PaperDimensions: 23 x 32 cm
Date: 2003
b.1960, Cardiff.
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.
In 2010, James received the Scottish Arts Council Visual Artists' Award.
