An exhibition of paintings by Suzy Willey.
September 14 - October 19, 2023
For the past 30 years Willey has used comic strips to investigate painterly concerns - edges, colours and brushstrokes. Willey plays with the consistency of oil paint, building up marks - in places almost like cake decoration. Some of the paintings follow abstract shapes which cause recognisable elements in the paintings to come in and out of focus - always seeming to reference strip cartoons. In others she applies this three dimensionsal treatment to the hyper flat imagery of Simpsons and Tintin stills.
Willey's paintings juxtapose a humorous, ready made, narrative with the use of thick paint and particular brush strokes - brush strokes that pull the viewer back to the here and now and the objectness of the painting.
"In my paintings I have been working from cartoons since I finished the Goldsmiths MA in the eighties. I am interested in the language of representation in painting and the contradiction/ confusion that happens when we see very humorous (well known) imagery represented as Fine Art. The image cannot be taken seriously - there is often something ridiculous happening in it- but my work is all about painterly concerns…
Thick paint and brush strokes that emphasise the luscious materiality of oil paint. In recent work I have gone a step further and layered a pattern over the top of the image, making sure that there can be no one reading of the image and making sure that there can be no hierarchy of image over materials or vice versa."
Suzy Willey
Suzy Willey studied at Goldsmiths’ College, London 1986-88 and completed the Turps Correspondence Course 2013-15. She has exhibited nationally and internationally in exhibitions at Dorothy Golden Gallery, California in 1992; Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge in 1993 and Connaught Brown in 1996. In 2016 Willey was selected for the Marmite Prize for Painting at Block 336 in London and Highlanes Gallery in Drogheda. This week Willey will be exhibiting as a selected artist in the Contemporary British Painting Prize and the John Moores Painting Prize.
