The Wyer Gallery Presents New Paintings by Mark Thompson

Written by Bridget Johnson Thursday, 29 September 2011 23:31

London.- The Wyer Gallery is pleased to present "Mark Thompson, New Paintings" on view at the gallery from October 1st through November 18th. Be it the edge of a village, the turning point of a river, or an empty city corner the moment before its streetlights flicker to life, Mark Thompson’s work depicts many things, but it is a preoccupation with moments of instability, of change and of boundaries between states such as certainty and doubt that is central to his practice.  The paintings exhibited here, in Thompson’s first exhibition with Wyer, are recollections of just such intangible moments.  They are pockets of time experienced on his lonesome travels across remote Icelandic, Scandinavian and Alaskan wildernesses and, through the alchemic power of the artist’s imagination – and of course the artist’s brush - made material on canvas.

When Thompson describes his studio practice it is the process of the imagination, this remembering (or perhaps ‘unpicking’, as the title of one painting suggests) of ‘the damp earth smells’ the ‘structures and hard staccato rhythms’ of what he’s seen and felt that comes across as most important.  What he has perceived in his travels in the outside world, are fragments melted down and recast into something newly created on canvas.  And as an extension of this idea, his paintings do not depict real places; rather he says, ‘taken literally they are to some degree self-portraits’.  It might be poetic license taken too far to describe what happens as ‘recollections in tranquillity’:  Thompson’s been known to paint to the musical accompaniment of Extreme Metal, although, to be fair, historically he’s worked to a soundtrack of the Minimalist music of Morton Feldman from whom he takes inspiration.  But might they depict the artist’s spiritual growth then as Wordsworth’s ‘The Prelude’ charted his? Speaking of Thompson’s undeniable kinship with the Romantics, art historian and gallery director, Dr Eva Marina Froitzheim, describes Thompson as an explorer in the footsteps of Caspar David Friedrich. The “romantic”, she sees not so much in his motifs, but in the search for his own place in the world. Only the monk at the sea is missing, she says, “with respect to these paintings, the viewer takes that role”. (Tröster, A Wanderer Moves through Space and Time’) Slade trained Mark Thompson is a British artist who is based in Germany.  He has galleries in both Germany and Seattle and has exhibited extensively across the UK, in Europe and the United States.


London's Wyer Gallery opened in the autumn of 2005 under the direction of Jane Wyer and is devoted to showing work by the best emerging artists from the UK and further afield. Exhibitions of gallery artists are presented alongside curated group exhibitions. The gallery is a 5 minute walk from Clapham Junction mainline station. Visit the gallery's website at ... http://www.thewyergallery.co.uk

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