Gainsborough, UK - Mik Godley has set himself a mission, to unearth Silesia, his mother’s homeland. His tools are the Internet and paint.  Godley’s subsequent story-so-far forms the upcoming exhibition at Bend in the River, Gainsborough starting on 24 March until 20 May.  The Nottingham-based artist has never set foot in the Sowie Mountains of Lower Silesia in Poland, where Albert Speer oversaw the construction of a vast network of underground tunnels for the Nazi war machine. Godley was brought up in Yorkshire and was never taken to Poland.  Now he has taken to painting a landscape he has never seen, painting people he is biologically linked to but who he does not know. He is using images three times removed from source.

Godley uses the material he feels most empathy with, paint. His pictures are painterly ‘post-pixel’ investigations. He fixes on Internet images at whim, employing his painterly ‘eye’. The motif may be a landscape photograph of the Sowie Mountain range or a picture of a Silesian woman taken from a dating website. The same image is often painted over and over again, sometimes with deliberate variation, sometimes not.

 

The art critic Matt Price neatly describes how Godley’s Internet research translates into paint : “Godley's research has been secondary rather than primary, using the Internet to locate information and images about the area and its history. That this has been a been a digital process, filtered through pixels, is reflected in the fact that the artist's canvases are painted with distinctive, overlapping rectilinear brush marks both opaque and in various degrees of translucency. When viewed close-up they are harder to decipher, coming gradually into focus as the viewer steps backwards … An impressive combination of methodical observation and technical draughtsmanship matched by a mature understanding of the medium and just the right amount of spontaneity and freedom give these studies a real sense of urgency, energy and vitality.” (Saatchi Gallery website blog, February 2007, reviewing Godley’s work in the recent Angel Row group exhibition ‘Terra Incognita’).

 

Godley’s pictures do not search for answers, but at the same time they are not reportage, a straight replication of a found image. The artist talks about Urwalt, the concept of the ‘primeval forest’ that shapes German identity. Perhaps, then, Godley is looking for a sense of empathy with the Urwalt  within his painterly journey.

 

This upcoming show by Mik Godley will be the first time he has exhibited at Bend in the River and is the first solo exhibition of this body of work. He has most recently shown at Future Factory (Nottingham Trent University), New Art Exchange (Nottingham), Angel Row (Nottingham) and a the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb (Croatia).