Image credit: Jo McGonigal, “Act seven: paler, blinder” (edit), 2018
To visit Blinder by appointment only contact info@patriciaflemingprojects.co.uk
To mark the end of 2019 we are pleased to present Blinder a solo exhibition with Manchester based artist Jo McGonigal. Following McGonigal’s 2016 exhibition SHIFT here at Patricia Fleming Gallery and working together this year on Sunday Art Fair London, we are delighted to announce we now represent Jo, and look forward to more exciting projects in 2020.
McGonigal makes reference to the visual analysis of historical Baroque painting, as a basis for understanding the medium of painting as a complex spatial construction. These observations materialise into McGonigal’s ‘spatial paintings’, constructed out of physical things in real space, where architectural concerns become complicit with the work. She uses both found and everyday materials, to examine the formal grammar of pictorial language - the vernacular of painting, where moments of drama, stillness, distance, translucency, edge and colour, co-operate to develop an understanding of painting as a retinal, physical and spatial event. Activating the body in the act of looking as much as the eye. She asks the viewer to gaze and pan, creating a panoramic view, then re focus, so the eyes remain in a perpetual state of unrest, moving from strong darks to light, taking in different degrees of distance, strengthened opacity and the coexistence of details.
Recent exhibitions include Fully Awake, Edinburgh University Galleries for Edinburgh Art Festival, 2019; After an Act, Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast, 2018; Mary Maclean & Jo McGonigal, RaumX Projects, London, 2017; Shift, Patricia Fleming, Glasgow, 2016; Between Painting & Place, Platform A Gallery, Middlesborough, 2015. She was shortlisted for the Contemporary British Painting Prize 2019 and longlisted for Aesthetica Art Prize 2016 has recently completed a Practice based PhD at the University of Leeds that examines Painting and Materiality.
Image Credit: Alan Dimmick