South Parade has announced its representation of Judith Dean (b. 1965, Billericay, UK), who lives and works in London, UK.
Judith Dean’s paintings question ways in which we look at images and art. Using her non-writing hand to reflect on control exerted by the conscious mind, Dean makes paintings that explore perspective and the singularity of the mind’s eye in framing and authorship. Using the contingency of found pictures on the internet, the compositions are framed as receding stages or galleries.
We see walls, floors, ceilings; separated rooms emerge from blind alleys, dead ends and shifting horizons. The digital world is a multiverse of images in which our attention is manipulated to focus on what is narrow and commercially and politically expedient. By painting numerous images within one painting, Dean distracts or prevents us from focussing on one subject – making us aware of both the mind’s natural control and society’s. The original images come from a variety of cultural, geographical and historical sources and the painting process assembles these disparate images into a world of staged inevitability.
About the artist
Judith Dean (b. 1965, Billericay, UK) lives and works in London and graduated from Wimbledon School of Art, London (1988) and Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam (1993).
Recent selected solo exhibitions include One Thing and the Others, Bodenrader (Chicago, 2024), New Builds / Bilds (The Image in Perspective), South Parade (London, 2023), and June, South Parade (Basel, 2023). Recent selected group exhibitions include Bodenrader (Chicago, 2023), The World Was All Before Them, TULCA (Ireland, 2022), The Void, White Columns Online curated by Daisy Sanchez (New York, 2021), twelve years in the making, Galeria Cadaqués (Spain, 2019) and 1D for Abroad, Tintype (London, 2019). Since her first solo in 1990, Dean has exhibited extensively internationally including exhibitions/performances at Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia (1997) and in Germany, Japan, Czech Republic and France, with solo exhibitions at Hales (London, 1997 & 2000). Dean was the winner of the Jerwood Sculpture Prize (2005) and is a Senior Lecturer at the University of the West of England, Bristol.
