13 Apr 2010

Michael Victor Jackson and Ben Pritchard at Wiebke Morgan, London

Michael Victor Jackson and Ben Pritchard

Wiebke Morgan is proud to present stunning and contrasting paintings by Ben Pritchard, co-inciding with his inclusion in the Jerwood Space´s survey of contemporary painting, and Michael Victor Jackson, the first chance to see his work in the UK for three years.
 
The show premieres a selection of works from Jackson´s recent series of paintings of his parents´ front room. While sharing an interest in the aesthetics of sketchy gestural brushwork and runny paint with Karin Mamma Andersson, Jackson´s paintings rework the meanings of the domestic interior genre from a more personal perspective imbuing his strongly articulated (though at times not entirely resolved) pictorial space with a melancholy intimacy. Forcefully modest and anti-heroic, the paintings also allow themselves to be read as portraits, and as a consideration of how we remember; the structure of memory, its patterns and fluidity.
 
Pritchard works with the languages of gestural abstraction and other styles in non-figurative painting to locate and crystallise meanings through the operation of pattern, colour and rhythm, orchestrating these across the surface of the canvas, but also developing and fixing a structure within it, leading the viewer to look into or through the painting to something else. For example, in one work a patterned form (almost heraldic in its semi-abstracted suggestion of a floral motif) is cast into shadow, or placed under, another layer of painting, its sombre shades echoing but never embracing late Rothko meditativeness. The paintings reflect a balance between conceptual starting points & frameworks, and an essentially improvised process that allows room for time and the everyday to influence the way a visual idea gravitates to its own completion, folding complexity into immediacy.
 
Ben Pritchard recently completed the three year course at the Royal Academy Schools. Picked as 'a talent to watch' by Charles Saumarez-Smith in 2008, Pritchard is included in the 2010 Jerwood Space survey show of contemporary painting, selected by Paul Huxley, RA, Calum Innes and Vanessa Jackson.
 
Michael Victor Jackson received his MFA from the Slade School of Art. His work, which ranges across sculpture, drawing and performance as well as painting, has been shown in the UK, Germany, Spain and Italy. This is his first London show for three years.