Group Show

Alter Ego is a group show that seeks to re-energize the painters’ voice amidst the clamour of an increasingly varied artistic landscape. This contingent of emerging artists create personas that consistently populate their work, these characters often act as a mouthpiece for the artists thoughts, while simultaneously re-calibrating ideas of what it is to be a young painter today.

In literary theory, when considering fiction or other narrative forms, the alter ego describes a key character in a story who is perceived to be intentionally representative of the work’s creator, by virtue of oblique similarities. The literary alter ego emulates the author’s behaviour, speech and mental landscape, becoming an effective mouthpiece for their ideas. As so often happens with literature and painting, this device overlaps.

Alter Ego looks at how a selection of young painters are using artistic personas in their work. The use of these secondary characters allows artists to occupy the worlds they create, they are no longer simply the detached creator but rather an inhabitant, an immutable presence within the fictive world. This practice allows different works to interplay; narratives develop and unfold over multiple pieces, all anchored around a central recurring character, much like a tv series. The alter egos are then able to deliver the artist’s vision with a kind of clarity and consistency that the individual would find impossible; the character can reach more people and gain a level of ubiquity that the artist often can not.

Alter Ego features the work of Oh de Laval, Philip Gerald, Shadi Al-Atallah, Tadija Janicic, Dominic Dispirito, Nicasio Fernandez and Danny Gretscher. With such an array of talent the show is sure to be a success, please join us on the evening of March 3rd for an artist discussion and private view. Click here for more details.