derrick guildmother figures

derrick guild

mother figures

1-30 may 2015

cover: Burnt cassowary, after oudry (detail) , 2013-15, oil on linen, 198 x 153 cms (cat. 5)left: fête galante, Apple, 2013-15, oil on linen, 46 x 36 cms (cat. 21)

foreword

Natural gift (detail), 2013-15,oil on linen, 112 x 82 cms (cat. 6)

the directors of the scottish gallery are delighted to present ‘mother figures’, our first major solo show for derrick guild, an artist better known in london and New York than in his home country. it has been an exhibition long in the making (his production is necessarily slow) and a relationship even longer in coming to fruition, but the waiting is over and the results spectacular.

the artist grew up in the countryside outside Perth, out in the fields on his own, making little discoveries in the hedgerows and pathways of an archaic landscape, isolation feeding his imagination. he visited the local museum as often as he could and loved the odd juxtaposition of the exhibits: Victorian taxidermy, ethnography and paintings from the eighteenth century, objects redolent with history, exotic and immutable. At art school his extraordinary facility combined with a necessary measure of obsession allowed him to use painting as his chosen path of discovery. Art for guild is illusory, an artifice part confection part icon. his range of reference is astonishing, his art historical appropriations so complete, so compellingly absorbed into his personal iconography that we are beguiled. unlike most painters his starting point is not a blank sheet but a choice of point of reality; will he paint on a three dimensional object (his resin cast potato or orange) or will he create the illusion of a piece of parchment, complete with age-curled edges which becomes the imagined support of his images? like so much conceptual art of the last century a small debt is owed to marcel duchamp (we can think of his mona lisa) but guild is spiritually closer to Juan sanchez cotan, the seventeenth century spanish painter of the bodegon. there is present also a deep respect for the medium: the paint is always the servant of the idea, he shares a mastery of the medium with 20th century painters as diverse as william Nicholson, lucian freud and ken currie. his title ‘mother figures’ informs his themes of fecundity, renewal and ancient worship but like so many of his visual references it is deliberately opaque: as much disquieting as reassuring to those who seek meaning.

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observing how easy it is to forget that the space of pictures is generated from its own content and “fused into a self-sufficient unity”, georg simmel remarked,

to be sure, the work of art draws its content from reality; but from visions of reality it builds a sovereign realm. while the canvas and the pigment on it are parts of reality, the work of art constructed out of them exists in an ideal space which can no more come in contact with actual space than tones can touch smells.1

simmel’s quote offers a starting-point to think about derrick guild’s recent paintings: that their content is drawn from reality but from that they construct visions of the artist’s imagination; that the work as physical object is subjected to the contingencies of actual space and time, while, as a work of art, its space is wholly of the mind. truths of painting generally, but they lead towards what is distinctive about guild’s: the depictive skill that conjures up objects for aesthetic attention and the simultaneous contradiction of their semblance of reality; the illusion of aged surfaces that acknowledges the erosions of real time while extending them into attenuated fictional times; and above all how meanings are spun out of things – the things of the painter’s compulsive envisaging (william carlos williams’s dictum, “no ideas but in things” could as well be derrick guild’s). An interplay of visual and conceptual associations and contrasts propels the artist’s cast of characters through their adventures in different fictive realities; visions that, though they do not belong to everyday reality, grow out of it: he is not a painter of fantasy.

to be specific, ‘Boarhills Botanical’ (2014-15) (cat. 1) depicts plants that grow in the artist’s garden (sunflowers, tulips, daffodils, dog roses and delphiniums) but here they sprout and bloom, hydra-like, from one composite stem in which all seasons and species are present together: nature, the one and many. Along with ‘After eden No. 3’ (2015) (cat. 2) it represents a theme that emerged from the artist’s two years on Ascension island (2007-09) where he encountered the man-made cloud forest, established by Joseph hooker in the mid-nineteenth century, in which plants from diverse locations and habitats now grow together. that impossible forest made real embodies the inexhaustibility and malleability of nature, which echoes at the domestic scale in ‘Boarhills Botanical’. the title alludes also to the inspiration of botanical illustrations, in which meticulous objectivity so often creates not truth to nature but lucid artifices remote from anything familiar to natural vision. trompe l’oeil is not the aim of botanical painting, and no more is it derrick guild’s. that would pitch his subjects too fully into concrete reality. realism must be sufficient, too much is destructive.

derrick guild mother figures

1 georg simmel, ‘the handle’, 1911, p. 1.

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Painting time is looking time and thinking time. what is painted is thought about; new visual ideas arise not bound by rationalism’s iron cage. inexhaustibility and malleability are as much powers of the mind as attributes of nature; and each is shot through with the other in guild’s paintings. he is and is not a painter of nature, drawn to things seen and known but captivated by their translation into images, and to what happens when unlike things meet. A magellanic penguin – the last penguin, maybe – stares expectantly at an orange that it seems inclined to nestle: ‘Natural gift’ (2013-15) (cat. 6) imagines alien orders brought inexplicably together, a strange meeting on the shore of a melancholic and absurd land, a contingency which (the picture suggests) may yet come to be.

there is something uncanny about guild’s works, something within their subjects that presses through to the physical surface into the image or object. this division in the heart of the subject drives flowers to entwine themselves against nature into pregnant and allusive messages – ‘fever Bulb’ (2014-15) (cat. 4), ‘mother figures’ (2013) (cat. 3); it twists humble vegetables into confounding hybrids of nature and artifice that only some joker god would conceive (a sliced potato reveals a chocolate interior; another is studded with diamonds); it joins and disjoins the ghostly figures from watteau’s ‘fêtes galante’ and representations of (variously) onion, mushroom, goldfinch, fig, shell, in a dance of two registers of reality. the uncanny may be felt as a background dissonance that barely reaches consciousness, emerging from unresolved and unresolvable feelings. it can also signal the point at which the poetry of visible things assumes the guise of a dark comedy of contradiction.

that something is connected to how guild makes time a constructive presence in his work. time is one of his actors as much as any of his objects, whether in ‘Boarhills Botanical’, ‘fête galante’ (2013-15) (cat. 19-25), ‘Natural gift’ or ‘Burnt cassowary’ (2013-15) (cat. 5). though diffused through everything, time’s presence is revealed, variously, by allusions to older works and sources, evoked by de-saturated colour or greyed and dark tonalities, mimicked in the dark wood of (specially made) display cases and the specimen-sculptures they protect, and manifested in painted stains, folds and tears. New works are framed by time; lustrous surfaces are dusted by it.

time as an actor is manifest in ‘Burnt cassowary’, a paraphrase of Jean-Baptiste oudry’s ‘cassowary’ of 1745 (the framing oval and painted folds are guild’s additions). the intimidating presence of the bird – which lived in the french royal menagerie – reflected its dangerous and strange character in oudry’s eyes: he noted that, “it will eat anything it is offered, even

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the hottest coals”. the association of fire with the cassowary goes back to sixteenth century reports which told of a bird that breathed fire, and this mythic bird, with its burning life-force and the hot coals it could quench with ease, makes, with oudry’s memorable personification of the actual bird, a compelling subject for appropriation. oudry’s painting engenders a chain of associations of which historical fact and painted artefact are simply links, fused again in the artist’s imagination: bird, myth, life-force, and coals burning back into the ideal space of the painting.

retrospection is a factor in how derrick guild structures the true fictions that compel his drive to pictorial expression, but it is only part of the story; he has a complementary sense of them being launched towards the future, poised on the saddleback of the present moment (to borrow william James’s term) and potent with significance that he can make no claim to author or anticipate. it is the wager artists make, that the future will find their works rich for reinterpretation, or even prescient (who knows, genetic science may yet enable plants like that in ‘After eden No. 3’ to be cultivated). in the sovereign realm of pictorial art (as opposed to bio-art) mind changes reality by direct action; endlessly branching associations reach from the past to the artist, to the viewer, to the future: malleable and inexhaustible. when the world is re-made in imagination, it is not as a rejection of how we live in the world as it is, because that inhabiting is, through and through, already an act of imagination. things are constantly made over again in the interplay between the sensual and the symbolic: “the old totems – animals, rocks, objects charged with lightning”.2

euAN mcArthur march 2015

2 Antonin Artaud, ‘the theatre and its double’, 1978, p. 5.fever Bulb (detail), 2014-15,oil on linen, 153 x 132 cms (cat. 4)

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1 Boarhills Botanical, 2014-15oil on linen, 163 x 112 cms

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2 After eden No. 3, 2015oil on linen, 62 x 47 cms

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3 mother figures, 2013oil on linen, 183 x 152.5 cms

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4 fever Bulb, 2014-15oil on linen, 153 x 132 cms

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5 Burnt cassowary, after oudry, 2013-15oil on linen, 198 x 153 cms

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6 Natural gift, 2013-15oil on linen, 112 x 82 cms

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7 No rhyme, 2015oil and acrylic on cast resin with coloured cast resin, mirror in artist designed case, 132 x 79 x 48 cms

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8 Parmentier Potato, 2015oil and cZ diamonds on cast resin, oil on linen in miniature frame, 25 x 11 x 6 cms

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9 cross Pollination, 2014acrylic on cast resin, oil on linen in miniature frame, 24 x 10 x 6 cms

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10 crop Parsnip, 2014oil and cZ diamonds on cast resin,15 x 5 x 5 cms

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11 charm, 2006-15oil on cast resin with costume jewellery, 23 x 26 x 3 cms

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12 Natural gifts, 2014mirror, oil on cast resin, pewter plates, natural amethyst, found plastic artichoke, artist designed case, 137 x 84 x 48 cms

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13 honey Bee Bread, 2014-15oil on linen under oval mount, image size 16 x 21 cms, frame size 28 x 35 cms

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14 goldfinch and chain, 2014-15oil on linen under oval mount, image size 16 x 21 cms, frame size 28 x 35 cms

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15 Bee Pear, 2015oil on linen over panel, 24 x 26 cms

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16 fall and fell, 2014-15oil on linen under oval mount, image size 16 x 21 cms, frame size 28 x 35 cms

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17 langoustine, 2014-15oil on fabriano Pittura oil painting paper, image size 16 x 21 cms, frame size 28 x 35 cms

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18 Natural gift, candles, 2014-15oil on fabriano Pittura oil painting paper, image size 16 x 21 cms, frame size 28 x 35 cms

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19 fête galante, fig, 2013-15oil on linen, 46 x 36 cms

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20 fête galante, Peach, 2013-15oil on linen, 46 x 36 cms

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21 fête galante, Apple, 2013-15oil on linen, 46 x 36 cms

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22 fête galante, goldfinch, 2013-15oil on linen, 46 x 36 cms

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23 fête galante, mushroom, 2013-15oil on linen, 46 x 36 cms

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24 fête galante, onion, 2013-15oil on linen, 46 x 36 cms

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25 fête galante, shell, 2013-15oil on linen, 46 x 36 cms

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derrick guild rsA

1963 Born in Perth, scotland

educAtioN

1982-86 first class BA honours in fine Art, duncan of Jordanstone college of Art and design, dundee

1987 Postgraduate diploma, highly commended, duncan of Jordanstone college of Art and design, dundee

solo eXhiBitioNs

2015 ‘mother figures’, the scottish gallery, edinburgh2013 ‘After A.d.’, long and ryle, london2012 ‘object Painting objects’, the scottish gallery,

edinburgh2010 ‘After eden’, Allan stone gallery, New York, usA ‘Paradise Paradise’, the scottish gallery, edinburgh2009 ‘derrick guild’, lux Art institute, encinitas,

cA, usA2007 ‘Pre-Ascension’, Allan stone gallery, New York,

usA ‘Picnic hamper for heaven’, Perth museum and Art

gallery, Perth2000 ‘Bread Paintings’, Allan stone gallery, New York,

usA1997 ‘choice Bread’, Paton gallery, london ‘sense is hard’, Pier Art centre, stromness, orkney1996 Allan stone gallery, New York, usA1994 Paton gallery, london

grouP eXhiBitioNs

2015 ‘scottish drawings’, royal scottish Academy, edinburgh

2014 ‘confections’, Allan stone Projects, New York, usA ‘wunderkammer’, Allan stone Projects at the metro

show, New York, usA ‘dis-functional’, Allan stone Projects, New York,

usA royal scottish Academy Annual exhibition,

edinburgh2013 the miami Project 2013 with the claudia stone

gallery, New York, usA royal scottish Academy Annual exhibition,

edinburgh

2012 royal scottish Academy Annual exhibition, edinburgh

‘the Artists studio’, the royal scottish Academy, edinburgh

‘min max’, the Allan stone gallery, New York, usA

2011 ‘Vegetable loves’, Polarcap Projects, dunbar ‘the fire Part of fire’, the outbye gallery,

Pitenweem2008 ‘gallery group 2008’, Allan stone gallery, New York,

usA ‘the scottish show’, donna Beam fine Art gallery

and marjorie Barrick museum, university of Nevada, las Vegas, usA; travelled to: hite Art institute, university of louisville, usA; the Art gallery, university of maryland, college Park, usA

2006 the royal scottish Academy Annual exhibition, edinburgh

2005 ‘doctor skin’, Perth museum and Art gallery, Perth2004 ‘guilding the summer town’, the royal scottish

Academy, edinburgh ‘Blind sight’, the royal scottish Academy,

edinburgh2003 ‘Animals’, Allan stone gallery, New York, usA ‘talent 2003’, Allan stone gallery, New York, usA ‘Albatross’, gallery stzuki, wosnia, Poland ‘Blind sight’, Visual research centre, dundee contemporary Arts, dundee Art space titanik, turku, finland2002 ‘group show’, Allan stone gallery, New York, usA2000 ‘fortieth Anniversary exhibition’, Allan stone

gallery, New York, usA1999 ‘fruits and flowers, skies and Pies’, Allan stone

gallery, New York, usA ‘food for thought’, New Jersey centre for the Visual

Arts, summit, NJ, usA1998 Allan stone gallery, New York, usA ‘food for thought’, dc moore gallery, New York,

usA1997 tribes gallery, New York, usA Paton gallery, london1995 Allan stone gallery, New York, usA1994 Paton gallery at the economist, london ‘stimulants’, frances cooper gallery, duncan of

Jordanstone college of Art and design, dundee

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‘Bringing in the New’, mcmanus galleries, dundee ‘A feast for the eyes’, long and ryle contemporary

Art, london1993 ‘inaugural exhibition’, Paton gallery at london

fields, london ‘scottish figurative Painting’, long and ryle

contemporary Art, london ‘Northlands’, st. fergus gallery, wick; travelled

to swanson gallery, thurso and the iona gallery, kingussie

‘the return of the cadavre exquis’, the drawing centre, New York, usA

1992 ‘the New decade ii’, Paton gallery, london long and ryle contemporary Art, london Paton gallery, london ‘the decade’, duncan of Jordanstone college of Art

and design, dundee and Barrack street museum, dundee

1991 ‘New Art from scotland’, kings manor gallery, the university of York, York

Paton gallery (two-person show with stuart mackenzie), london

‘A View of the New’, the royal overseas league, london

‘the New decade i’, Paton gallery, london1990 ‘four scottish Painters’, Barbizon gallery, glasgow warwick Arts centre, the university of warwick,

coventry ‘New faces 3’, Paton gallery, london ‘two scottish Artists’, the Barbizon gallery, glasgow Paton gallery, london1988 ‘contemporary scottish Art’, emanuel college,

university of cambridge, cambridge1987 ‘contemporary maritime Painting’, the frigate

unicorn, dundee ‘contemporary scottish Art’, emanuel college,

university of cambridge, cambridge ‘the New generation’, compass gallery, glasgow mercury gallery, edinburgh1986 ‘rank Xerox travelling exhibition’, london1985 ‘the New generation’, compass gallery, glasgow1984 ‘sexuality in the media’, Art institute of chicago,

chicago, illinois, usA diadem Architects centenary exhibition, Perth

AwArds

2012 highland Artist Award, royal scottish Academy, edinburgh

2010 elected member of the royal scottish Academy2009 lux Art institute, encinitas, cA, usA, Artist-in-

residence2006 royal scottish Academy maud gemmell hutchison

Bequest2005 carnegie trust Award for the universities of scotland2004 royal scottish Academy sir william gillies Bequest

Award1999 hope scott trust Award, edinburgh1994 hope scott trust Award, edinburgh the Villiers david Award1987 royal scottish Academy sir william gillies Bequest

Award royal scottish Academy stuart Prize1986 elizabeth greenshields foundation Award farquhar-reid traveling scholarship1985 John duncan of drumfork Award hospitalfield house summer scholarship1984 diadem Architects centenary Award ian eadie Award, duncan of Jordanstone college of

Art and design, dundee sed minor traveling scholarship1983 matthew Prize for Painting, duncan of Jordanstone

college of Art and design, dundee

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selected PuBlic collectioNs

Aberdeen Asset managementAlan stone collection, New York, usAdundee museums and Art galleries, dundeedundee university, dundeePerth museum and Art gallery, Perthschool of the Art institute of chicago, chicago, il, usAthe fleming-wyfold collection, londonthe scottish Arts council, edinburgh

teAchiNg eXPerieNce

2014 Visiting lecturer, edinburgh college of Art, edinburgh

2014-15 Visiting lecturer, duncan of Jordanstone college of Art and design, dundee

1992-2011 Part-time lecturer in fine Art, duncan of Jordanstone college of Art and design, dundee

selected BiBliogrAPhY

“the heart of drawing – scottish drawing at the royal scottish Academy”, arts-press.co.uk, 2015

rae, haniya. “three Artists serve up donuts, Pie, and other confections in richly colored Paintings”, Artsy editorial, 19 december, 2014

Patience, Jan. “review: 188th royal scottish Academy Annual exhibition royal scottish Academy Building, edinburgh”, the scotsman, 4 April, 2014

“‘minimal, geometric and reductive works from the Allan stone collection’ opens in New York”, artdaily.org, september, 2012

“Visual Art review: royal scottish Academy Annual exhibition”, the scotsman Newspaper, 2 may, 2011

mccormack, ed. “derrick guild’s Visual “fictions” trump tromp l’oeil”, gallery and studio magazine, November-december, 2010

kreimer, Julian. “derrick guild, New York, at Allan stone”: Art in America, 1 december, 2010

kuspit, donald. “the New Naturalism”: Artnet magazine, 22 November, 2010

mullarkey, maureen. “derrick guild: After eden”, city Arts, 14 september, 2010

Ayres, robert. “on the fingers of one hand, the best of this week’s New York gallery shows”: A sky filled with shooting stars, 8 september, 2010

ollman, leah. “Playful hybrids of Nature”, los Angeles times, 14 June, 2009

Pincus, robert. “making Past Present.” san diego union tribune, 2 Jul, 2009

Blackwood, John. “derrick guild Pre-Ascension”, exhibition catalogue, Allan stone gallery, New York, 2007

mullarkey, maureen. “A taste for Nonconformity”, the New York sun, 5 April, 2007

“derrick guild”, American Arts Quarterly, summer 2007, p. 61, 62“scottish artist looks for work to ascend with island move”,

the scotsman, 5 march, 2007windle, mike and todd, graeme. “guilding the summer town”,

exhibition catalogue, royal scottish Academy, 2006skipwith, selina and smith, Bill. “A history of scottish Art.

the fleming collection”, merrel , 23 may, 2003mccormack, ed. “derrick guild Bread Paintings”, exhibition

catalogue, Allan stone gallery, New York, 2000New York magazine, galleries: solos. 29 march and 10 April,

2000Johnson, ken. the New York times, galleries: uptown.

31 march and 17 April, 2000“loaf and behold”, time out New York, issue 234.

16-23 march, 2000Bischoff, dan. “A matter of taste”, the sunday star-ledger.

4 April, 1999filler, marion. “food is art in new exhibit”, daily record morris

county, NJ. 23 April, 1999“food for thought”, exhibition catalogue, dc moore gallery,

New York and New Jersey centre for Visual Arts, 1998Zimmer, william. “A feast where Not everything looks good

enough to eat”, the New York times. 18 April, 1999henderson, kevin. “sense is hard”, exhibition catalogue, Pier

Arts centre, orkney, 1997Art review, June 1996, p. 31mccormack, ed. “gaudi and Busquets share the bill with

derrick guild at Allan stone gallery”, gallery and studio. Autumn, 1996

the New Yorker, galleries – uptown. November 18, 1996gavin, dawn. “derrick guild Paintings 1994”, Paton gallery,

london, 1994

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Portrait of derrick guild in his studio, photographed by william Van esland, 2015.

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Published by the scottish gallery to coincide with the exhibition

derrick guild: mother figures

1-30 may 2015

exhibition can be viewed online at

www.scottish-gallery.co.uk/derrickguild

isBN: 978-1-910267-15-8

designed by www.kennethgray.co.uk

Photographed by william Van esland

Printed by Barr colour Printers

All rights reserved. No part of this catalogue may be reproduced in

any form by print, photocopy or by any other means, without the

permission of the copyright holders and of the publishers.

16 dundas street, edinburgh eh3 6hZ tel 0131 558 1200 email mail@scottish-gallery.co.ukwww.scottish-gallery.co.uk

right: fête galante, goldfinch, 2013-15, oil on linen, 46 x 36 cms (cat. 22)

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