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18.10.00-21.01.01
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curated
by Millton Keynes
Gallery
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Click
on images to enlarge
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Gallery
at Cube
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Airport
oil & acrylic on canvas on board
762mm
x 914mm
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Zoo
oil on linen
686mm
x 762mm
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School
oil & acrylic on linen on board
91cm x 91cm
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Houses
into Flats: Alison Turnbull
Alison
Turnbull (b.1956), an established British artist, has collaborated with
a number of architectural practices and her paintings are included in
various public and private collections, including The Arts Council, The
British Council and Deutsche Bank, London.
For her show at Cube
she presented Houses into Flats, a series of paintings made over the last
three years, in which she investigates the ways we transform the spaces
we inhabit. The images are generated by found architectural plans, sections
and elevations, representing public and domestic buildings from around
the world. Sourced from books, maps, antique plans and the Internet, and
floated onto subtly coloured fields, these plans become tokens of that
process of conversion of drawing into painting, of a diagram into a picture.
Through her technique of layering and abrading the surfaces of her paintings,
Turnbull subjects each architectural blueprint to a kind of archaeology
and has likened the series to building an imaginary town or evoking the
exigencies and pleasures of daily life.
Works include:
Airport
A drawing of Tokyo's Narita Airport generated this painting. An anonymous
diagram taken from the Internet was transferred to canvas by the 'spolvero'
technique used in Renaissance fresco cycles. The synthetic harmony of
the colours, however, is typically Japanese and Airport is the only painting
in which the colour is given by the original source, rather than invented.
Zoo
The ground plan of the zoological gardens in Calcutta comes from a 1911
map of the city and the parchment - coloured creaminess of the painted
ground echoes the faded paper of the old map. The dispersal of the shapes
across the canvas is in contrast to the essentially symmetrical and frontal
placement of most of the other images in the series.
Spa
A book on spa architecture in the Catalan Pyrenees is the source for the
image. It is not just the intense blue of the painting that evokes water
- the small, dense image of the spa seems to float on the surface of the
painting, whereas the background image shifts and fragments, like something
seen through water at the bottom of a pool.
School
School, the final painting in the series, takes a diagram of a school
designed in Puerto Rico around 1900 as its starting point. It is important
to Alison Turnbull that the school is in Latin America; she was born there
and during her childhood her father was involved in school-building programmes
in South and Central America. As well as representing education, the idea
of a school evokes memories of childhood.
A colour catalogue,
published by Millton Keynes Gallery, with essays by Briony Fer and Deyan
Sudjic is available in the bookshop. Price £10.00
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