Peter McDonald
29 May - 05 Jul 2009
PETER McDONALD
29 May – 5 July 2009
For his third solo show at the gallery, Peter McDonald draws us further into the hallucinatory world he creates in his paintings. Its inhabitants, who are recognisably human in their endeavors and emotions, engage in activities ranging from the mundane to the extraordinary: shopping for carpets, watching a sunset, worshipping mythological deities.
Edge of the Jungle depicts two characters engaged in filming a nature documentary, their subject unseen as they perch on the border of an endless foliage. Drawing on Henri Rousseau’s intricate paintings of imaginary plants, McDonald veers from controlled detail to expressive swathes of colour in a celebration of texture and tone. A new series of paintings and works on paper depicts a family in a carpet shop, each carpet a miniature abstract painting made vividly, and accurately, peculiar. Combining a sharp eye for situational humour with formal explorations of colour and shape, McDonald has developed an individual and idiosyncratic iconography that celebrates the human condition.
‘My painted world is not Utopian. I do not see it as an ideal.
I see it as a very real reflection of the world we live in and an exploration of the human condition. My painted world has no hierarchy. The characters in my paintings are 'types' as opposed to individuals. They have no eyes. Individual identity is flattened. The constructed nature of our reality is acknowledged. What remains hints perhaps, to an underlying natural order. My paintings are a personal vision and a celebration of life.’
PETER McDONALD born 1973 Tokyo, lives and works in London
Art for Everyone Peter McDonald has recently completed a billboard commission for London Underground at Southwark station, May - November 2009. McDonald won the John Moores Painting Prize in 2008, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Other recent exhibitions include Peter McDonald, Gallery Side 2, Tokyo, 2008 and Like Color In Pictures, Aspen Art Museum, Colorado, 2007
29 May – 5 July 2009
For his third solo show at the gallery, Peter McDonald draws us further into the hallucinatory world he creates in his paintings. Its inhabitants, who are recognisably human in their endeavors and emotions, engage in activities ranging from the mundane to the extraordinary: shopping for carpets, watching a sunset, worshipping mythological deities.
Edge of the Jungle depicts two characters engaged in filming a nature documentary, their subject unseen as they perch on the border of an endless foliage. Drawing on Henri Rousseau’s intricate paintings of imaginary plants, McDonald veers from controlled detail to expressive swathes of colour in a celebration of texture and tone. A new series of paintings and works on paper depicts a family in a carpet shop, each carpet a miniature abstract painting made vividly, and accurately, peculiar. Combining a sharp eye for situational humour with formal explorations of colour and shape, McDonald has developed an individual and idiosyncratic iconography that celebrates the human condition.
‘My painted world is not Utopian. I do not see it as an ideal.
I see it as a very real reflection of the world we live in and an exploration of the human condition. My painted world has no hierarchy. The characters in my paintings are 'types' as opposed to individuals. They have no eyes. Individual identity is flattened. The constructed nature of our reality is acknowledged. What remains hints perhaps, to an underlying natural order. My paintings are a personal vision and a celebration of life.’
PETER McDONALD born 1973 Tokyo, lives and works in London
Art for Everyone Peter McDonald has recently completed a billboard commission for London Underground at Southwark station, May - November 2009. McDonald won the John Moores Painting Prize in 2008, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Other recent exhibitions include Peter McDonald, Gallery Side 2, Tokyo, 2008 and Like Color In Pictures, Aspen Art Museum, Colorado, 2007