MATTHEW RADFORD Surveillance
5 March 2009 - 28 March 2009
British artist Matthew Radford is widely known for his work with crowds, most recently enigmatic paintings featuring people enmasse overlaid with formal grids and images that refer to pixels, computer graphics and digital images. Radford confesses to having been fascinated with crowds since he was a child and as an adult he manipulates a standard crowd scene to explore the idea of the individual among many.
Some works are bordering on abstraction, where Radford examines the non-subject areas of the scene. Radford presents these more abstract images as gateways for seeing other things, specifically the duality of the spiritual world and physical world which he believes can never be experienced separately. Less abstract works depict figures in urban settings who are isolated from one another, despite the crowd. As the artists says "Ultimately, the reason why I paint people all the time is because I care what happens to them. If I didn't care I wouldn't bother."
City life is the starting point for the artist, not out of a love for urbanity but because it is representative of life in its most condensed form, constantly changing with contradictions explicitly visible. Radford is able to balance the urbanity of the crowd with the painterly quality of his work which make them beautiful simply when understood as a mass form, colour and shape.
Radford has exhibited widely in the UK and has also had solo shows in Los Angeles, New York, California, and Germany. His work is in several important collections included The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The New York Public Library and Corpporate Collections. The artist has also held teaching posts at the prestigious Slade School of Art, New York Studio School and Camberwell Art School.
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