Daniel Sturgis: Fill of Beauty

When I was awarded a Northern Arts, Scottish Arts Council and English Heritage fellowship to work in the Hawksmoor Barracks at Berwick upon Tweed, I was able to study one of most complete Baroque buildings in Britain, Vanbrugh's last building Seaton Delaval Hall (1718-28).

Seaton Delaval Hall is important, as Vanbrugh has moved beyond the florid and flamboyant baroque to a hard style of playful formalism. This Baroque language focuses on the difficulties to develop stylistically after a classical precedent. I have researched this style of a hard/formal baroque and this research forms a tangential project that I have found inspirational.

For this exhibition I created a twenty-one foot painting 'Fill of Beauty' that dominated the gallery. The play between site and work was important in this presentation. The formal border within the painting can be seen as defensive as well as decorative. The Berwick ramparts which surrounded the barracks on the once contested border between England and Scotland is derived from the earlier Baroque city planning of Europe. The scale of Fill of Beauty also echoes high modernist colourfield painting. [e.g. Barnett Newman Anna’s Light, which is over six meters long]. The painting departs from works such as this through a series of conceits which are more closely associated with the Baroque: the reinterpretation of history as outlined by Baroque buildings like Seaton Delaval Hall; ideas of dynamic movement or progression; an animated narrative (of forms); and a theatrical scenic depiction of space. Fill of Beauty has run together elements from both the Stylistic Baroque and a Baroque model of inheritance.

A publication to accompany the exhibition was produced with an essay by artist and critic Edgar Schmitz.

Biography

Daniel Sturgis is a London based artist, he received an MA from Goldsmiths College in 1994, where he subsequently taught, until being appointed Course Director in Painting at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London. Recent exhibitions include 'Plastic Culture: Legacies of Pop 1987 - 2008', Harris Museum, Preston (2009); 'Invisible Cities, Jerwood Space, London (2009); and the solo presentations 'Possibilities in Geometric Abstraction', Galerie Hollenbach, Stuttgart (2008) and 'Everybody Loves Somebody', The Locker Plant, Chinati Foundation, Marfa Texas (2007). He has curated a number of exhibitions looking at aspects of contemporary painting and its historic legacy. These include, Daniel Buren's 'Voile Toile/Toile Voile', Wordsworth Trust Grasmere (2005); Between 'Letters and Abstraction', Wordsworth Trust (2004); co-curated with Richard Kirwan 'Jeremy Moon - A Retrospective' (2001), and co-curated with Martyn Simpson 'Perfidy' at Le Corbusier's convent Santa Marie de la Tourette in France.

In 2008 he was awarded a PhD by Oxford Brookes University, his thesis examined the position of abstract painting, and the use of the Baroque, in early post-modern thought.

• http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/disco...
• http://www.seatondelaval.org.uk