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| Richard Shepherd: New Paintings 2 September – 29 October 2006 |
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| Richard Shepherd likes canvas. In particular the
clothness of it, the way it folds, absorbs paint, how it can be manipulated.
He also likes the painting frame and flatness wherein something mysterious
can reside. He talks about the painter Morris Louis and about Tachism, about what it is to make a painting, how to make a painting in a world where it seems every painting that could be made has already been made. Richard Shepherd is a product of the late 1970s. As a student at the Royal College he was a rebel; politically active, he embraced both Marxism and Art and Language. He studied printmaking, although his interests crossed artistic boundaries. When he left he drove London buses for 5 years while he worked out what it was all about. What remains of interest to Shepherd from this period of political ferment, institutional lethargy and artistic questioning is a belief that painting today should deal directly with the inheritance of modernism, particularly American painting. Also, that a painting can be ‘critical’ by bringing itself into question in terms of its own painterly language, its containing culture and its wider historical context. That said, Shepherd is a no slave to theory. He is a ‘worker’ who does painting. A brief piece of writing pinned to his studio wall reads: ‘So it’s myself, the agent, and my relationship to other agencies – a push-pull, an exchange, a borrowing and a lending, a holding and a letting go.’ He has found a way, in these recent paintings, to accommodate himself, his thoughts. At times barely there, the images he creates float somewhere above the actual canvas. It’s painting – just. This upcoming show of recent work by Richard Shepherd will be the first time he has exhibited at Bend in the River and the first time the work has been shown. Artist resumé Born London 1952. BA painting Liverpool Poly 1972-5; MA Royal College of Art 1975-8. Exhibition history includes John Moores (1995), Northern Young Contemporaries, Brixton Art Gallery, Daniel Wahrenberger (Zurich), Warehouse (Lowestoft) and variously around Norwich, where he currently lives and works. |
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