Exhibition:
A Landscape of Death and Love
The Mezz Gallery, Broadway
Cinema, Nottingham
Nottingham
Evening Post : 1st November 2005
Dean Sherwin can see the Alps from his flat
in Nice. The mountain range is the "landscape of death and
love" in the title of his new exhibition of paintings upstairs
at Broadway cinema.
But, he says, he slightly regrets being so
specific about it.
A Landscape of Death and Love can be seen until
November 27.
"It's any landscape, it's my landscape,
it's your landscape," says Sherwin, who, while Nottingham-born
and bred, will be spending the rest of the year in France and
enjoyed a lot of last year in Madrid. He is in fact a fine landscape
painter, and one seemingly drawn to the landscapes and climate
of southern Europe.
Throughout the five previous series of paintings,
Sherwin's produced semi-abstract canvasses, sometimes of Spain,
sometimes of a nowhere and everywhere never identified. And usually
they're populated by a single blank figure ? his "figure
in a painterly landscape" which Sherwin says is himself,
the artist seemingly lost in his own work and the world.
Sherwin described himself as a "painterly
painter" meaning, in non-art lingo, he's a painter in the
non-clever-clever pre-conceptual sense who produces art you might
even, gosh, want to hang in your own home.
"I'm aware that I'm in a corner of France
which has been painted by many other artists including Sutherland,
Bacon and Picasso." These are also among the people he admires.
"I like the painterly painters. If I see a flat space on
a canvas it just kills me because it's completely different from
what's really there."
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