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unreliability as an historical document.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.
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