Approved: 13.01.2017

Philip Gatenby

Artist, Curator, Researcher

Approved: 13.01.2017
  • Location: Stockton on Tees, North East

Artist Statement

I think of the studio as a place where thoughts and memories make themselves known. Doubts and certainties tussle around as each painting begins, some things carry, some don't. The legacy of non-representational painting presents itself as sufficiently fragmented in its former certainties as another one of my yet to be fathomed rules and regs. The prime concern out of this tussle reveals itself as an insatiable grappling with figure and ground. Sometimes the figure is the viewer, sometimes an entity within the frame - a tower, a grid, a line, a contour - sometimes not. Likewise, ground confers an immediate association with physical substance, in this instance a screen/grid motif situates a moment of resistance enabling the materiality of paint to do no other than counter. These works appear to me as inescapably of nature, a condition that carries contradictory assumptions, entanglements that build sequentially, a nudge to understand more about how linearity is stilled.

 

 

 

CV & Education

Phil GATENBY b.1950 Email: [email protected] Mobile: 07590  837785

It's a pleasure in my role as Head of Fine Art, to have established the first BA (Hons) Fine Art Programme on campus at Teesside University in 2007. To see this provision grow in its first seven years to include post graduate studies in Fine Art onsite and, rather wonderfully, in the Czech Republic is a privilege. Life and times move on and since retiring from this role in 2014 to see this provision transform again in the cultural hub of Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art is an enticing prospect.

My prime interest is painting. As a studio based practitioner I am familiar with the tussle of doubts and certainties that play out as each new painting begins. Starting out involves some do's and don'ts, rules and regs that many will recognise as arbitrary constraints.

Selected Exhibitions: 2021: Ten Years Platform A Middlesbrough Railway Station, Teesside; Object 01, Teesside Response Collection, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (Mima), Teesside; 2020 Enough is Definitely Enough, Pineapple Black, Middlesbrough; 2019 Conversations in Painting: 'Legacy, 50 Years of Painting in Teesside,' The Auxiliary, Middlesbrough; 2018 Stockton Contemporary, The Auxiliary Project Space, Stockton on Tees; Parallel Tracking- the curious case of abstraction, Platform-A Gallery, Middlesbrough; 2017 Conversations in painting: ‘if it fits in the Fiesta you’re in…’ Crown Street Gallery, Darlington; Crossing Borders - site-specific installation, Felix the Gallery, Middlesbrough Art Weekender; 2016 Artist in Residence Exhibition, Das Spectrum, Utrecht; 2015 Fast Forward, Rewind and Walk On, Platform Arts, Peterlee.

Studio Group Membership: 2017-21 Riverside House Studios (Navigator North & East Street Arts), Middlesbrough;  2016-17 Keld House Artist Studio, (Navigator North & East Street Arts), Thornaby, Stockton on Tees; 2014-15 Platform Arts Studios, Lee House, Peterlee.

Selected Gallery Visits: 2021 Swimming Backwards, Sid Motion Gallery, Bermondsey, London; 2020 Rembrandt's Light, Dulwich Picture Gallery, South London; 2019 Headlands, Elizabeth Magill: New Art Gallery, Walsall; Francis Bacon & Ellen Gallagher, Hatton Gallery, Newcastle; May You Live in Interesting Times, 59th Venice Biennale; 2018 At The Gates and Tremble, Tremble: Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, Summer Jam, A painting show, W139 Gallery, Amsterdam; 2017 The Discovery of Mondriaan, Gemeentemuseum, Den Haag; Philip Guston and the Poets, Gallerie dell Accademia, Venice, Italy; Viva Arte Viva, 57th Venice Biennale; 2016 British Art Show 8, Inverleith House, Talbot Rice and Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; When Now Becomes Then -Three Decades, Basil Beattie, mima gallery, Middlesbrough; 2015 Wilful Blindness, W139 Gallery, Warmoesstraat 139, Amsterdam; Phyllida Barlow, Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh; John Chamberlain, Inverleith House, Edinburgh; All the World’s Futures, 56th Venice Biennale, Italy; Raoul de Keyser, Inverleith House, Edinburgh; and Real Painting, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester .

Selected Research Events: 2021 Tees Politics, History & Ideas, Mima, public programme; An Anecdoted Archive of Exhibition Lives - interview discourse with Nora Sternfeld, Irit Rogoff & Relli de Vries... via webinar hosted at BAK; 2018 Teaching Painting, Painting The New,  Conference,  Royal Academy, London; 2017 Art in a Time of Interregnum, BAK Summer School, Utrecht; 2015 Painting in Time Symposium, The Tetley, Leeds; and Teaching Painting: A Conference, Manchester School of Art in partnership with Whitworth Gallery, Manchester.