Art Show: Graham Dean ** 8 Oct – 7 Nov 2016 ** Cameron Contemporary Art
One of Britain’s most powerful figurative painters, Graham Dean’s career has spanned four decades and seen his work exhibited worldwide. His watercolour works have been described as ‘extraordinary’ and ‘immensely powerful’ in his relentless investigation of the human body.
PRIVATE VIEW: Friday 7th October 2016, 6 – 9pm
This is Dean’s first solo exhibition in Brighton, his home, for 20 years and co-incides with the launch of a major book on Dean from Unicorn Publishing.
Dean is renowned for his challenge of accepted ideas about watercolour, wrestling it away from its 18th century roots in landscape painting to make monumental, life-size depictures of the human body that can take years to complete.
Employing a technique that he calls “reverse archaeology”, Graham Dean transforms the conventional use of watercolour painting. Contrasting layers of paint are laid separately onto porous handmade Indian paper, achieving a density and brilliance of colour that is visceral in its effects, merging the figure with the organic process of paint spreading through paper. Sections from several different versions of the same composition are torn away and reassembled in a form of collage, lending each image a rawness and immediacy, which supports the emotive and dramatic qualities of the works.
2nd Avenue
Brighton and Hove
BN3 2LJ
Source: GRAHAM DEAN – Cameron Contemporary Art
