Past Event: Bad To The Bone, Jonny Green Solo Exhibition
Jonny Green’s paintings are precise renderings of very imprecise, rather expressionistic sculptures. Green’s working process is long and labour intensive, beginning with making miniature sculptural objects fabricated from accumulated everyday and discarded, overlooked objects, such as screws, nails, plasticine and electrical tape. The artist then lives with the pieces, discards or edits them, photographing his few selected pieces then paints them. The point of photography is important in Green’s process as this is the moment where most of the decisions are made in terms of its presentation, reducing the subject from 3 dimension to 2, choosing what will be shown and what will be concealed and the painting process is a documentation of these decisions. Once painted, his objects, once flawed and abject are transformed and take on a monumentality and depth not originally present in their original state. Within his process, Green’s works bring to mind ideas of displacement, otherness, metamorphosis, and the abject and the vulnerable. Green explains his approach as one of chasing the human element within his objects, to tell their story and make their voices heard and validate them. Previously creating the sculptures in a ‘stream of conscious’ working process, Green’s latest works are purposefully directed towards portraiture. His paintings thereby exist as portrait and still life, as anthropomorphized objects crossing over to subject, both animate and inanimate. What we, the viewer are presented with is highly realised pictorially yet intentionally ambiguous, we don’t know what we are looking at, its provenance and what its intention is and it is this ambiguity that challenges us.
Bad To The Bone is Jonny Green’s first solo exhibition at the gallery, following the success of his highly acclaimed solo presentation at London Art Fair 2016, Art Projects. This show was featured in After Nyne, Boooooom and Hi-Fructose.
Jonny Green’s work has featured in Art Review, a-n, ArtLyst, Tate etc., The Evening Standard, The Guardian, The Independent, Time Out, FAD, Modern Painters and It’s Nice That. His work is collected by Deutsche Bank, Hull City Art Gallery, Sony International and the Susan and Bob Summers Collection.
Born 1966, North Yorkshire, United Kingdom. Lives and works in London.
View available works on Jonny Green’s Artist Page