Installation View: Patrick Caulfield, “Stillness & Darkness,” The Approach, London. Image Courtesy The Approach, London.
“Stillness & Drama,” currently on view at The Approach in London’s Bethnal Green area, is a presentation of paintings from the late 1980s and early ’90s by the late British artist Patrick Caulfield (1936-2005).
Composed of both large and small canvases, the exhibition aims to shed light on Caulfield’s personal fascination with and soft spot for public spaces, and the still life images they can provide.
“Possessing a deep yet often nostalgic and melancholic mood through distinctive use of light, shadow and colour, the paintings resonate within their physical context,” the press release states, “through their reflective celebration of uninhabited social environments.”
The Approach’s gallery venue is well-known for its location above a pub of the same name, and such a setting—the pub being associated with togetherness and comfort—lends itself to the public space element present in Caulfield’s work.
In a 1995 writing by Michael Bracewell, first published in Afterall, Bracewell wrote of Caulfield’s work: “…these paintings take their places as studies of consciousness—our empathetic relationship to our own experience of the modern world … The modern world is shot through with intimacy regulators, and an aspect of the art of Patrick Caulfield is to convey the simultaneous experience of intimacy and distance: our own awareness of ourselves looking on.”
Patrick Caulfield, “Stillness & Drama” is on view at The Approach, London from November 4—December 11, 2016.