Installation view: Marten Elder
Paul Winstanley
AFTER THE WAR THE RENAISSANCE
10 October - 19 December 2020
1301PE is pleased to announce Paul Winstanley’s seventh exhibition with the gallery: After the War the Renaissance. The exhibition is comprised of nine new paintings from his series Situation, The Lilies and Interior with Large Window. For the past three decades, Winstanley’s paintings have investigated the subjects of vacant spaces, the commonplace, and the dystopic, and painting’s ability to transform these familiar and at times melancholic landscapes into the sublime.
The role of the viewer is central to an understanding of Winstanley's paintings and his recent use of the figure echoes that active passivity which is reflected in his new Situation paintings. The gallery part of the paintings derives from photos Winstanley took in the Secession, in Vienna, a few years ago. It's a very early model of a modernist gallery that has been the inspiration for countless others works since. Winstanley says, “The aim is for them to approach a kind of realism, to subscribe to languages of photography, but also to teeter on the edge of falsehood.”
Interior with Large Window (Red and Blue) are reminiscent of his 2008 diaphanous and translucent series Veil. Winstanley says of his new series based on a real life Hamburg church, “The modernism of the window’s design appealed to me directly because of the internationalism of this visual language and the sense of post-war renaissance embedded in it.” The Lilieswere started in 2019 long before the present viral situation arose, but since then they seem to have acquired this other possible layer of metaphor in relation to the passing from one to another.
Paul Winstanley was born in Manchester in 1954 and lives and works in London. His first retrospective was held at ARTSPACE in Auckland, New Zealand. Other solo exhibitions include Driven Landscapes, Camden Arts Centre, London and Annexe, Tate Britain, in London, UK. Selected group shows include Window to the World, Fondation de l'Hermitage, Lausanne, which traveled to Museo Cantonale d'arte and Museo d'arte, Lugano, Switzerland; Lifelike, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Deer, Le Consortium, Dijon, France; Out of focus. After Gerhard Richter’, Kunsthalle Hamburg, Germany; Sea Fever: From Turner to today, Southampton City Art Gallery, UK; Terror and the Sublime: Art in an Age of Anxiety, Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, Ireland; Conflict Tales: Subjectivity, Burger Collection, Berlin, Germany; Self as Selves, Irish Museum of Modern Art Dublin, Ireland; Inside Architecture, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and 8 Visions, One Dream, Today Art Museum, Beijing, China.
For more information please contact Susan Sherrick or Brian Butler at 323.938.5822
