Paul Harvey, “Nigella Lawson”, image copyright the artist and courtesy of Spectrum London.
Spectrum London gallery set out to prove that the Stuckists’ paintings should be taken as seriously as their politics, with Go West, the group’s first ever show in a commercial West End gallery.
The pro-painting Stuckists, have closed their own Shoreditch gallery to go west.
Royden Prior, Director of Spectrum London, said, “These artists are good, and are part of art history. Get past the art politics and look at the work”
Go West at Spectrum London features paintings by 10 leading members of the Stuckists group, headed by founder Charles Thomson, some of whose work is explicit images of his ex-wife Stella Vine’s former life as a stripper.
Raw autobiographical painter Joe Machine paints the paranoid after-effects of witnessing pornography and knife fights as a child.
The confident burlesque titillation of ex Go-go dancer Ella Guru’s images of London’s demimonde are set off by portraits of Nigella Lawson and Charlotte Church, painted meticulously with a sable brush by punk guitarist Paul Harvey, formerly of the band Penetration. Peter McArdle is an obsessive artist, who lives in an unheated Northumberland farmhouse and works with Renaissance glazing techniques in his attic studio from 4 am, seven days a week. Philip Absolon was rejected from art school and paints unemployed skeletons. Elsa Dax, Eamon Everall, Wolf Howard and Bill Lewis range from a neo-cubistically divided mother and child, through Diana bathing to God Is an Atheist – She Doesn’t Believe in Me.
Opening 6th October.
