The Skinny Showcase: Stephen Thorpe

Aberdeen graduate Stephen Thorpe was chosen as The Skinny Award winner at last year's RSA New Contemporaries exhibition. The outcome of his prize is this Showcase and an exhibition, The Poetics of Space, in Edinburgh's Whitespace which opens on 28 April

Gallery by Rosamund West | 03 Apr 2012

Showcase: Stephen Thorpe

Aberdeen graduate Stephen Thorpe was chosen as The Skinny Award winner at last year's RSA New Contemporaries exhibition. The outcome of his prize is this Showcase and an exhibition, The Poetics of Space, in Edinburgh's Whitespace which opens on 28 April

Working in oil, canvas and expanding foam, Stephen Thorpe creates obsessively immaculate paintings with solid, rough hewn edges that physically emerge from the wall, reminiscent of fragments of antique friezes hacked out, shipped off and redisplayed in a pristine gallery. Their physicality and manner of display touch on ideas of cultural appropriation, while the compositions reveal dreamlike interiors that bend the rules of space and physics. The work in The Poetics of Space is explicitly inspired by the the theories of Gaston Bachelard. Other influences range from the Leipzig School, Neo Rauch and David Schnell, to Hockney to Renaissance painting to the surreal dreamscapes of Inception

He says, “Neo Rauchs and Schnells really appealed to me, they were so vibrant and rigid. But they were also quite painterly, and I loved that balance of tight lines and also abstraction, very free hand stuff. It’s a very conscious effort [in my work] to get the balance right so they’re not too sterile by being too geometric, so using freehand work in there too.

The grid patterns peeking out beneath the surface of the paint – I used to do that in uni to help me orientate and do the geometric stuff. It’s no longer required but I like to keep it in as part of the process. I always try to leave a bit revealed in a painting to show every level, every layer, every stage of making.

The physicality of [the work] emerged through discussions with my tutors, particularly Andy Cranston. He came to an exhibition of mine, and he said it would be good if you could cut the wall out around it and frame it then stick the painting with the bit of wall cut out on a wall... Which got me thinking about the edges, making them more organic.

With this show, I specifically wanted to look at movement within the work. It doesn’t necessarily, specifically represent movement – these things could be just suspended or animated. It’s to do with the idea of taking things for granted. And that we all do it. Just to raise questions about what we do take for granted. What if it started to come undone? What if gravity stops working?

 It’s the first show I’ve done that’s in a new direction of sorts, within interiors. I’d just come back from New York [when I made this work]. I got taken with the intensity and the madness of it. The instability of it. I wanted to add some madness to my work. It always feels quite fragile, the wheels of life, what’s keeping it all together. What makes us conform and behave. I guess that’s just something that’s in the paintings, touching on that vulnerability.”

 

 

 

 

28 Apr-10 May, Whitespace, 11 Gayfield Square, Edinburgh, free