News
Tuesday 6 November 2007
Award-winning artist to hold inaugural exhibition in Nottingham (Closer than you think: painting, place and mortality, Nov 15-Dec 4 2007)
The relationships and encounters we have with both real and imagined locations will form the basis of a breathtaking exhibition of recent paintings at Nottingham Trent University. Closer than you think: painting, place and mortality, is the inaugural exhibition by Terry Shave, Professor of Fine Art in the University’s School of Art and Design.
A base image layer, inspired by photographs and previous artwork by Professor Shave, is built upon over time by the hand application of multiple layers of coloured resin; the result is a collection of striking images with intense depth and colour. Each image is presented in three sections, each unique, but achieving a sense of equilibrium through the harmonising of colours which thread through the piece.
"Although the initial starting image is barely recognisable through the tinted resin layers, I like the idea that it is still trapped within the painting," said Professor Shave, whose exhibition will be held in Nottingham Trent University’s Bonington Gallery. It will be preceded by his sell-out inaugural lecture on November 14 in the University’s Bonington Lecture Theatre.
He added: "The work attempts in visual form to evoke a journey with ‘stations’ or points of meditation and reflection. They try to reveal the dilemmas of picturing and how, through new technology, our encountered world is often a hurried fiction based on a collective, touristic sense of place and time.
"The paintings are intended to entice and beguile, and to challenge the way we understand and interpret the reality of our surroundings."
Professor Shave has an extensive record as an artist and arts educator. He exhibits regularly both in the UK and abroad and has won prizes in the John Moore’s painting exhibition, Liverpool, and the Unilever Award, London. He has also curated exhibitions that explore drawing, museum collections and the state of contemporary painting in the UK, the most recent being for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Washington DC, USA.
ENDS
Notes for editors:
Entry is free to the exhibition, which is being staged in the Bonington Gallery, Nottingham Trent University, Dryden Street, Nottingham. It is open weekdays 10.00am to 5.00pm from Thursday 15 November to Tuesday 4 December 2007.
Over the past ten years Terry Shave has initiated and developed a significant range of public arts projects. These focus particularly on location specific intervention work which attempts to use art to explore socio-political and historical interpretations of a site. The locations range from a Tudor house, managed by the National Trust, to a series of empty flats on a deprived housing estate. These projects have involved professional artists and postgraduate students working and exhibiting together, and always address audience and reception as a key focus of intent and debate.
Press enquiries please contact: Dave Rogers, Press Officer, on +44 (0)115 848 8782, or email dave.rogers@ntu.ac.uk.
Or Therese Easom, Press and Media Relations Manager, on +44 (0)115 848 8774, or email therese.easom@ntu.ac.uk.
