- Venue
- Huddersfield Art Gallery: Unit 7
- Starts
- Saturday, January 22, 2022
- Ends
- Saturday, April 2, 2022
- Address
- Unit 7 Princess Alexandra Walk, Huddersfield, HD1 2RS
- Location
- Yorkshire
- Organiser
- Huddersfield Art Gallery
KEITH ASHCROFT
CUT FROM CLOTH
Huddersfield Art Gallery Unit 7
22nd January to 2nd April 2022
Keith Ashcroft’s paintings are disrupted and reconfigured to form new worlds operating between realities. Loaded with visual information, his almost-spaces gather and dissolve in plain sight in a continual process of becoming. These paintings are never fully realised in a conventional sense, but unfold through the act of looking, taking on the agency of other objects of being.
Fostering a curiously intimate relationship between painter and space, Ashcroft’s paintings are constructed over extended periods of time, fuelled by periodic field trips, and orchestrated through the complex process of picture making. His colour handling emits an aura akin to the materiality of his subject matter, and his marks are unashamedly raw with pigment assuredly applied. Comprising a repertoire of painted motifs – tables, platforms, columns and curtains, walls, chairs, corners and cracks, to mention a few – Ashcroft transforms the apparatus of everyday life into lush painterly arrangements, rich in the evocation of a wandering mind.
For the last three years, Ashcroft has been developing a series of paintings inspired by Queensgate Market in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire. Thought to be the only design of its kind in the world, the building is supported by twenty-one asymmetric hyperbolic paraboloid structures (hypars) laid out at different heights to form the market hall roof. The result is a pattern of inverted modernist umbrellas, where natural light is channelled through the intersection of objects and shadows, colours and textures, into 187 market stalls below. Existing as backdrops, demarcations and overlapping frameworks, located inside, between and across the paintings, the hypars provide an atmospheric condition more than a direct pictorial subject. It’s the ground level activity that particularly interests Ashcroft, and it’s here where his paintings emerge.
Artist Bio:
Keith Ashcroft (b. 1977, St Helens, UK) is a painter based in Salford, UK. He graduated with a BA Fine Art from Manchester School of Art in 2000. Keith is a Lecturer in Painting with the Open College of the Arts and co-runs Oceans Apart, a gallery in Salford dedicated to contemporary painting. Keith has exhibited his work across the UK and he was shortlisted for the Contemporary British Painting Prize 2018 and awarded Special Commendation for his painting ‘Inside Out’.
