ALASTAIR GORDON

2020 Young Masters Guest Artist Alastair Gordon is a London based artist and tutor and a course leader for the Graduate Residency Scheme at Leith School of Art, Edinburgh. Last year, Alastair was artist in residency for City and Guilds of London Art School followed by a parallel residency with PADA Studios in Lisbon. He has had recent solo exhibitions at Aleph Contemporary, London (2020) and Ahmanson Gallery, Los Angeles (2017). Works feature in various international collections and public museums. He was the inaugural winner of the Shoesmiths painting prize and recently co-recipient of the Dentons Art Prize. His third book, Why Art Matters was published by Inter Varsity Press last year. Cynthia Corbett Gallery has also debuted Gordon's work in New York at Scope 2020 and Art on Paper 2022. Gordon studied at the Glasgow School of Art and received his MA in painting from the Wimbledon School of Art.

Begun in the landscape yet completed in the studio, these new works by Alastair Gordon mark a fresh trajectory for the artist. Gordon is best known for highly illusionistic paintings (rooted in the quodlibet tradition) but here he combines his heightened sense of realism with historical notions of intuitive wildness and British wilderness painting. Gordon makes paintings about paintings; works that oscillate between artifact and artifice. We are presented with landscapes as still lives and sketches as completed works. Certain questions emerge about authenticity, the painting process and how we consider notions of landscape today. The veracity of the object is constantly in doubt yet the wild is ever calling.

In making these new works Gordon travelled to the outer reaches of the British Isles, undertaking a painting pilgrimage from the heights of the Lake District, depths of Caithness peat flows and furthest reaches of the Outer Hebrides. Sitting atop mountain peaks and sinking into peat bogs each work begins in the landscape. As Gordon states, ‘I don’t seek a view but a sense of place’. From here the paintings are developed in the studio to appear as drawing boards and sketchbook work. Oscillating between hyperrealism and intuitive gesture, they both tame and subsume to the wilderness itself.

Gordon's will be making his debut at Expo Chicago in 2023.

Alastair Gordon

Available 2023