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Mark Fairnington, Bull Market
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Saturday 13 March to Saturday 24 April

This exhibition is the first time this series of stock bull paintings will be shown together by British painter Mark Fairnington. His three bulls are painted life size and include a variety of British breeds painted meticulously on vast white canvases. Rather than being photorealist, the brushstrokes are evident in these painterly works, but the use of life size scale is key. Accompanying the bull paintings, are a further range of works by Fairnington, each questioning scale, documentation and the role of painting.

Images of museum specimens, birds to insects and more, are painted by Fairnington complete with label tags and pins. When considered alongside the bull paintings, they appear tiny, yet the creatures are significantly magnified. Zoological artifacts in storage become the subject for a series of drawings that create an almost mythological diorama, acknowledging the museological displays in natural history museums. The inclusion of their crates and stands highlight their absurdity.

Unlike the Bull paintings, Fairnington’s hybrid plant series are constructs: part real, part imagined, these plants are strange, beautiful, nearly recognisable and easily believable. They highlight the essential freedom of painting and its unreliability as an historical document. This questioning of veracity reflects the age-old practice of animal and plant hybrid cultivation and breeding, a process Fairnington explores through paint.

This exhibition is pertinent to West Suffolk where these issues are still central to the seed industry, horse racing and agriculture in West Suffolk.

Courtesy the artist and Fred, London.

arts council england, east logost edmundsbury borough council logosuffolk county council logo

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