Gestalt Thinking

Gestalt Thinking (2022) is an essay published to accompany the exhibition publication of Richard Kirwan - Intellectual Property at Lungley Gallery.

Richard Kirwan’s paintings address notions of pictorial signification as a vehicle – or transmitter – for faceted markers of the artist’s ‘cultural memory’, which punctuate broader notions of his lived experience. The essay explores the way Kirwan's paintings are not simply aide-memoires to recall a moment or experience; rather they are a new experience, fusing memory with material disciplines of painting. The essay touches on a new field of memory studies and associated theorists - and the way in which Kirwan began exploring the use of a repeated ‘asterisk’ motif, during the artist’s postgraduate studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London - as a repository for quotidian lived experience where colour choices might be informed by art history, but equally, the histories of architecture, design, and fashion; proposing that cultural production has a way of filtering and permeating not only existing knowledge, but the production of new memories.

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