ART SPACE GALLERY | Michael Richardson Contemporary Art

ART SPACE GALLERY | Michael Richardson Contemporary Art

www.artspacegallery.co.uk

Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 11 am until 7 pm

STEPHEN FINER

Paintings

2nd July – 31st July 2004

WOMAN'S TORSO, 1998, oil on canvas 16 x 12 ins.

The Gallery website www.artspacegallery.co.uk includes 14 of the paintings included in the exhibition as well as the article INTIMACY AND MORTALITY: FINER’S PEOPLE by Robin Gibson reproduced from the Exhibition catalogue.

Stephen Finer’s work has been exhibited regularly in London and abroad since the eighties; most notably in the National Portrait Gallery: 2003, The National Portrait Gallery Collects; 2000-2001, Painting the Century 101 Portrait Masterpieces 1900-2000; and 1993, The Portrait Now.

Stephen Finer paints complete or partial figures. Some are unnamed, others identified: Gill Bastedo, Kitaj, David Bowie, Lord Shawcross. They are not formal descriptions but there is conspicuous character and a very physical human presence throughout.

Apart from a group of mostly post-card sized watercolours, they are oil on canvas. Some are dense and heavily painted, the surface worked and reworked, some more spontaneous, although throughout, the paint is laid on with a vigour and directness that probes the limits between representation and the abstract qualities of paint. Norbert Lynton has written of Finer's painting that:

Some are very dramatic and grave; others shine, gem-like, with the life of coloured marks. I had not expected to need the word 'beauty' in writing about this complex searching art, but my mind's eye is full of it.