Daniel Sturgis: We Work Together

Solo exhibition WE WORK TOGETHER by the British artist Daniel Sturgis.

The exhibition presents a series of three interconnected paintings and a watercolour.

Sturgis is interested in investigating the limitations of modernist formalism whilst using the formal modernist language of abstraction. As such he is interested in how painting can adhere and depart from known positions simultaneously. His paintings and works on paper question the notion of an isolated or detached style of formalism by recognising that such a language can never be outside of culture and histories. His work references this through their use of material and visual quotation. In WE WORK TOGETHER the central composition of the circle and the square nods to the classicism and schema of Vitruvian Man, but the works references are never explicit. Likewise, the paintings are not concrete or mathematically set up. Rather they should be seen as provisional and approximations. Elements in one work allude to other paintings or representation in a broader ‘culture’ through their use of the language of art, design, animation and web aesthetics. The paintings which are made slowly in acrylics by hand seem to comment on more industrialised forms of production. Formally elements in the works can be seen to be mistranslated or to shift or be in slightly the wrong place or context. They allow your mind to have permission to associate, to correct, to straighten the way that they are drawn or balanced, or imbalanced. These distortions are welcomed as the paintings – together and individually – are forthright, open and accepting to difference.

• https://www.psprojectspace.nl/ex2020_Dan...