BLACKBIRD ROOK
Superama
GEORGE YOUNG
Kite 1, 2024, Oil on paper, 64 x 47cm
Blackbird Rook Presents
Superama
GEORGE YOUNG
10 September - 15 October 2024
The TCHC Viewing Room gallery, GU34 3YU
This new body of paintings combines aerial landscapes and floating shapes - figuration, colour-fields, texture and abstraction. ‘Kites' are seen from above - painted with brush, roller and airbrush. They are textured and evidence process and changes in direction through overlapping layers. They show clean, machine-like fades and colour blocks that overwrite thoughts, mistakes and past potential futures.
These kites float high above, and obscure, simple, gestural, fluid landscapes. The paintings are figurative but have a relationship to abstraction through their flattened blocks of colour. They move between the two. The landscapes don’t show hills or silhouettes, panoramas or vistas but flattened coloured panels delineated by crops, roads and hedgerows. The earth looks incongruously slick, light and airy whilst the flying kites are often worked and strangely leaden.
“The landscapes chosen all derive from places that are well known to me, but increasingly are a collage of these places chosen for their shape, texture or compositional affect - as well as any personal significance. This way the kite can obscure areas of interest or be surrounded by them, without anything hidden or removed, creating a hybrid of narrative and abstraction.
“I think of these paintings as being about the environment and our interaction with it, insofar as they show its managed neatness - landscape without wilderness or the true expression of nature. They are of well-known places but seen from an impersonal viewpoint, synonymous with technology, surveillance, maps and 'find my iphone’, rather than any real immersion or interaction. Overlaying this with shapes that lack the true movement of kites, though having evolved more organically than the landscape beneath, creates a contrast that is about interaction or imposition in a different way.”
Next to the kite paintings we find autobiographical scenes of a family in the garden, in reflective poses, and a window from the viewpoint of a bed, staring out at a blue sky. These mark another contrast - an origin. They are painted in a more expressive way, with less neatness or control, and they mark the starting point of those reveries that take us into the blue sky of the kite paintings and find us looking down on the possibilities below.
Kite 3, 2024, Oil on paper, 64 x 47cm
George Young is a painter and print maker living and working in Somerset. He studied painting at Falmouth College of Art and the Royal College of Art. Since then he has shown widely in solo and group exhibitions, art fairs and biennials throughout Europe and the U.S. George has been awarded several prizes, residencies and purchase prizes throughout his career and his work is included in major collections.
