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.

EXHIBITIONS INCLUDE

Museum of Modern Art, Paris; Triumph Gallery, Moscow; Waterhouse and Dodd, London; Frans Jacobs, Amsterdam; Utrecht; Williamson Art Gallery and Museum , Birkenhead . 60th birthday exhibition; Museum of Modern Art, Arnhem; and the Whitechapel Art Gallery, Royal Academy and National Portrait Gallery in London. Dean has participated in some of the most prestigious art fairs in the world, including FIAC, Paris, TEFAF, Maastricht and Basel Art Fair.

COLLECTIONS INCLUDE

Anita and Gordon Roddick Collection; Arts Council; David Geffen L.A; Arts Council; Ferens Museum and Art Gallery, Hull; Glasgow Museum of Modern Art; ING Art Collection, Amsterdam: Musik-Und Kongreshalle, Lubeck; Financial Services Authority, London; National Gallery of Jamaica; Peter Gabriel, Real World Studios; Southern Arts; Royal Bank of Scotland; Scheringa Museum of Realist Art, Holland.

1 Victoria Grove
2nd Avenue
Brighton and Hove
BN3 2LJ