DOMINIC
SHEPHERD
Lucifer
Rising
Private
View
Thursday November 4th
6.30pm–8.30pm
Exhibition
Dates
Friday November 5th – Saturday December 4th
2010
Gallery Hours
Wednesday–Saturday 11am–6pm
or by
appointment
Address
336 Old St, London, EC1V
9DR
Contact
+44 (0)20 7739 4055
direct@charliesmithlondon.com
www.charliesmithlondon.com
CHARLIE SMITH london is
delighted to present Dominic Shepherd with his first one person show at the Old
Street gallery.
In Latin Lucifer means
‘light bearer’, and came to refer to the planet Venus, otherwise known as
the ‘Morning Star’, which can be witnessed an hour before sunrise in the
skies of the east and an hour after sunset to the west. Lucifer then, signifies
first light, the time when the darkness and mystery of night turn towards the
clarity of dawn. It is at this point with its shifting nuances where Dominic
Shepherd’s most recent paintings operate.
Shepherd invites us into a
time and place that is in-between, a place of mystery and the imagined. Calling
to mind John Fowles’ ‘The Magus’, Shepherd envisions a place populated by
magicians, solitary wanderers, messengers, lost poets, artists and musicians, a
place that is between reality and sur-reality where the macabre and the
frivolous walk hand in hand. This imagined place is prompted by Shepherd’s own
immediate environment, where cottage and studio sit isolated in a clearing
within dense Dorset woods. Stepping into these woods at night one feels
simultaneously stimulated and threatened, but one is urged to embrace the
shadows and the illusion that lie therein, where the fictive obfuscates truth.
At night, perhaps, such
experience is appropriate, during the time of revelry and ritual, magic and
intoxication. All take place beneath the cover of darkness. But at the hour of
daybreak, as the morning star arises, thresholds other than that of night to day
are broken. Reality returns and with it a wistful awareness of a loss of the
other. The dreamlike and hallucinatory are overcome by a confrontation of the
self where one can emerge enlightened as with St John of the Cross or fallen as
with so many romantic heroes from throughout history. Indeed, Shepherd’s
canvases might be populated by lost icons and anti-heroes such as Hesse, Redon,
Shelley, Blake or Wagner or more contemporaneously Brian Jones, Keith Richards
or Charles Manson. ‘The sleep of reason brings forth monsters’, cautioned
Goya and Shepherd outlines that escapism, individualism and heroism, and the
drives of the intuitive and the unconscious can bring egotism, destruction and
excess as well as beauty, magic and discovery, thus simultaneously enticing and
forewarning.
Please contact gallery for
images and further
information.
Biographical:
Born:
1966
Education: 1994 – 1995: MA
in Painting, Chelsea College of Art and Design; 1985 – 1988: BA (Hons) in Fine
Art, Chelsea College of Art and Design
Selected Exhibitions: 2010:
The Future Can Wait (curated by Zavier Ellis & Simon Rumley), Shoreditch
Town Hall, London; Mycelium (one person), The Arts University College at
Bournemouth; Papyrophilia, CHARLIE SMITH london, London; DEMONOLOGY, CHARLIE
SMITH london, London; New British Painting, Gallery Kalhama & Piippo
Contemporary, Helsinki; 2009: In the Country of the Blind (one person), Galerie
Schuster, Berlin; New London School (curated by Zavier Ellis & Simon
Rumley), Galerie Schuster, Berlin; 2007: Meeting Place, Russell Cotes Art
Gallery & Museum, Bournemouth
Collections: Paula Granoff,
Providence, Rhode Island; Steve Shane, NYC; Markus Winzer, Untersiemau; Private
collections in Germany, Japan, Switzerland, United Kingdom & United
States