Derrick Guild | Mother Figures

derrick guild

mother 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: FĂŞte Galante, Apple, 2013-15, oil on linen, 46 x 36 cms (cat. 21)

foreword

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.

GUY PEPLOE

Natural Gift (detail), 2013-15, oil on linen, 112 x 82 cms (cat. 6) 2

derrick guild mother figures

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.

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.

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Fever Bulb (detail), 2014-15, oil on linen, 153 x 132 cms (cat. 4)

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1 Boarhills Botanical, 2014-15 oil on linen, 163 x 112 cms 8

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2 After Eden No. 3, 2015 oil on linen, 62 x 47 cms 10

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3 Mother Figures, 2013 oil on linen, 183 x 152.5 cms 12

4 Fever Bulb, 2014-15 oil on linen, 153 x 132 cms 14

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5 Burnt Cassowary, after Oudry, 2013-15 oil on linen, 198 x 153 cms 16

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6 Natural Gift, 2013-15 oil on linen, 112 x 82 cms 18

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7 No Rhyme, 2015 oil and acrylic on cast resin with coloured cast resin, mirror in artist designed case, 132 x 79 x 48 cms 20

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8 Parmentier Potato, 2015 oil and CZ diamonds on cast resin, oil on linen in miniature frame, 25 x 11 x 6 cms 22

9 Cross Pollination, 2014 acrylic on cast resin, oil on linen in miniature frame, 24 x 10 x 6 cms 23

10 Crop Parsnip, 2014 oil and CZ diamonds on cast resin,15 x 5 x 5 cms 24

11 Charm, 2006-15 oil on cast resin with costume jewellery, 23 x 26 x 3 cms 25

12 Natural Gifts, 2014 mirror, oil on cast resin, pewter plates, natural amethyst, found plastic artichoke, artist designed case, 137 x 84 x 48 cms 26

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

14 Goldfinch and Chain, 2014-15 oil on linen under oval mount, image size 16 x 21 cms, frame size 28 x 35 cms 29

15 Bee Pear, 2015 oil on linen over panel, 24 x 26 cms 30

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16 Fall and Fell, 2014-15 oil on linen under oval mount, image size 16 x 21 cms, frame size 28 x 35 cms 32

17 Langoustine, 2014-15 oil on Fabriano Pittura oil painting paper, image size 16 x 21 cms, frame size 28 x 35 cms 33

18 Natural Gift, Candles, 2014-15 oil on Fabriano Pittura oil painting paper, image size 16 x 21 cms, frame size 28 x 35 cms 34

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19 Fête Galante, Fig, 2013-15 oil on linen, 46 x 36 cms 36

20 Fête Galante, Peach, 2013-15 oil on linen, 46 x 36 cms 37

21 FĂŞte Galante, Apple, 2013-15 oil on linen, 46 x 36 cms 38

22 FĂŞte Galante, Goldfinch, 2013-15 oil on linen, 46 x 36 cms 39

23 Fête Galante, Mushroom, 2013-15 oil on linen, 46 x 36 cms 40

24 Fête Galante, Onion, 2013-15 oil on linen, 46 x 36 cms 41

25 FĂŞte Galante, Shell, 2013-15 oil on linen, 46 x 36 cms 42

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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 2013 2012 2010

2009 2007

2000 1997

1996 1994

‘Mother Figures’, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh ‘After A.D.’, Long and Ryle, London ‘Object Painting Objects’, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh ‘After Eden’, Allan Stone Gallery, New York, USA ‘Paradise Paradise’, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh ‘Derrick Guild’, Lux Art Institute, Encinitas, CA, USA ‘Pre-Ascension’, Allan Stone Gallery, New York, USA ‘Picnic Hamper for Heaven’, Perth Museum and Art Gallery, Perth ‘Bread Paintings’, Allan Stone Gallery, New York, USA ‘Choice Bread’, Paton Gallery, London ‘Sense is Hard’, Pier Art Centre, Stromness, Orkney Allan Stone Gallery, New York, USA 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, Edinburgh 2013 The Miami Project 2013 with the Claudia Stone Gallery, New York, USA Royal Scottish Academy Annual Exhibition, Edinburgh

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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, Pitenweem 2008 ‘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, Perth 2004 ‘Guilding the Summer Town’, The Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh

‘Blind Sight’, The Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh 2003 ‘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, Finland 2002 ‘Group Show’, Allan Stone Gallery, New York, USA 2000 ‘Fortieth Anniversary Exhibition’, Allan Stone Gallery, New York, USA 1999 ‘Fruits and Flowers, Skies and Pies’, Allan Stone Gallery, New York, USA

‘Food for Thought’, New Jersey Centre for the Visual Arts, Summit, NJ, USA 1998 Allan Stone Gallery, New York, USA

‘Food for Thought’, DC Moore Gallery, New York, USA 1997 Tribes Gallery, New York, USA

Paton Gallery, London 1995 Allan Stone Gallery, New York, USA 1994 Paton Gallery at the Economist, London

‘Stimulants’, Frances Cooper Gallery, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee

‘Bringing in the New’, McManus Galleries, Dundee ‘A Feast for the Eyes’, Long and Ryle Contemporary Art, London 1993 ‘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, London 1990 ‘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, London 1988 ‘Contemporary Scottish Art’, Emanuel College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge 1987 ‘Contemporary Maritime Painting’, The Frigate Unicorn, Dundee

‘Contemporary Scottish Art’, Emanuel College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge

‘The New Generation’, Compass Gallery, Glasgow Mercury Gallery, Edinburgh 1986 ‘Rank Xerox Travelling Exhibition’, London 1985 ‘The New Generation’, Compass Gallery, Glasgow 1984 ‘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 Academy 2009 Lux Art Institute, Encinitas, CA, USA, Artist-inResidence 2006 Royal Scottish Academy Maud Gemmell Hutchison Bequest 2005 Carnegie Trust Award for the Universities of Scotland 2004 Royal Scottish Academy Sir William Gillies Bequest Award 1999 Hope Scott Trust Award, Edinburgh 1994 Hope Scott Trust Award, Edinburgh The Villiers David Award 1987 Royal Scottish Academy Sir William Gillies Bequest Award Royal Scottish Academy Stuart Prize 1986 Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Award Farquhar-Reid Traveling Scholarship 1985 John Duncan of Drumfork Award Hospitalfield House Summer Scholarship 1984 Diadem Architects Centenary Award Ian Eadie Award, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee SED Minor Traveling Scholarship 1983 Matthew Prize for Painting, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee

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SELECTED PUBLIC COLLECTIONS Aberdeen Asset Management Alan Stone Collection, New York, USA Dundee Museums and Art Galleries, Dundee Dundee University, Dundee Perth Museum and Art Gallery, Perth School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA The Fleming-Wyfold Collection, London The 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, NovemberDecember, 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

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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, 2007 Windle, Mike and Todd, Graeme. “Guilding the Summer Town”, Exhibition Catalogue, Royal Scottish Academy, 2006 Skipwith, Selina and Smith, Bill. “A History of Scottish Art. The Fleming Collection”, Merrel , 23 May, 2003 McCormack, Ed. “Derrick Guild Bread Paintings”, Exhibition Catalogue, Allan Stone Gallery, New York, 2000 New York Magazine, Galleries: Solos. 29 March and 10 April, 2000 Johnson, 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, 2000 Bischoff, Dan. “A matter of taste”, The Sunday Star-Ledger.

4 April, 1999 Filler, 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, 1998 Zimmer, William. “A Feast Where Not Everything Looks Good Enough to Eat”, The New York Times. 18 April, 1999 Henderson, Kevin. “Sense is Hard”, Exhibition Catalogue, Pier Arts Centre, Orkney, 1997 Art Review, June 1996, p. 31 McCormack, 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, 1996 Gavin, Dawn. “Derrick Guild Paintings 1994”, Paton Gallery, London, 1994

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.uk

www.scottish-gallery.co.uk

Right: FĂŞte Galante, Goldfinch, 2013-15, oil on linen, 46 x 36 cms (cat. 22) 48

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