21 April - 16 June 2018
Private view Friday 20 April, 6pm - 8pm
Artist Talk: Graeme Todd in conversation with Scott McCracken | Friday 25 May, 5 - 6pm
Laure Genillard is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings by artist Graeme Todd spanning the last ten years. Within his practice Todd explores the spatial construction of paintings and their material properties through combining drawing and painting materials - including acrylic paint, gesso, ink, pencil and varnish – through a multi-layered approach. His dense and complex landscapes meticulously scrutinise and warp preconceptions of the material world.
On first glance these works appear unfamiliar and spatially disorienting, not seeming to align with any recognisable world, but on closer inspection biomorphic and geological scenes start to emerge on the compactly painted surface depicting rocks, trees, houses, traces of insects, birds and other elements native to his surroundings.
Drawn from various sources - referencing actual geographies and histories alongside constructed and surreal imagery - the landscape for Todd takes on a certain unreality, there are references to the fantastic, the layered mark, the art of the outsider, the obsessive, the tiered, the mad and the random and their conjunctions with the present, becoming a world of open diversity and retrospective reflection – a kind of performed cosmos where the world forms us as we form the world.
Graeme Todd (b.1962, Glasgow) lives and works in Dunbar, East Lothian. He is represented by Galerie Alessandra Bonomo in Rome, Galerie Brigitte Weiss in Zurich and has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally. A major exhibition of his work will take place at Summerhall in Edinburgh later in 2018. Recent solo exhibitions include; Street Hermit, Galleria Alessandra Bonomo, Rome 2018 and The View from Now Here, Eagle Gallery London, 2015. His works are held in the collections of Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Kunsthaus Zurich and Migros Museum in Zurich, Arts Council of England and other public and private collections.
Graeme Todd in conversation with Scott McCracken : View Transcript
