Paul Winstanley is a British painter and photographer based in London.Buckman, David. Artists in Britain Since 1945, Bristol: Art Dictionaries Ltd, 2006. Retrieved 28 July 2022.Irish Museum of Modern Art. Paul Winstanley, Veil 11, Collection. Retrieved 28 July 2022. Since the late 1980s, he has been known for meticulously rendered, photo-based paintings of uninhabited, commonplace, semi-public interiors and nondescript landscapes viewed through interior or vehicle windows.Tumlir, Jan. "Paul Winstanley," Artforum, December 2010. Retrieved 1 August 2022.Pollack, Barbara. "Paul Winstanley," ARTnews, October 2011.Hubbard, Sue. "Space Inveiglers," The Independent, 29 October 2004. He marries traditional values of the still life and landscape genres—the painstaking transcription of color, light, atmosphere and detail—with contemporary technology and sensibilities, such as the sparseness of minimalism.Wolin, Joseph R. "Paul Winstanley," Time Out New York, October 2011.Astoff, Jens. "Paul Winstanley," Artforum, October 2013. Retrieved 1 August 2022.Breen, Matt. "Paul Winstanley," Time Out London, 12 April 2016.Dunne, Aidan. "Minimalism in the Dutch Golden Age at the Kerlin," The Irish Times, 23 May 2017. Retrieved 1 August 2022. His work investigates observation and memory, the process of making and viewing paintings, and the collective post-modern experience of utopian modernist architecture and social space.Downey, Anthony. "Paul Winstanley," Contemporary, November 2002.Carey-Kent, Paul. "Artist's Writing; Paul Winstanley," FAD Magazine, 11 September 2019. Critics such as Adrian Searle and Mark Durden have written that Winstanley's art has confronted "a crisis in painting," exploring mimesis and meditation in conjunction with photography and video; they suggest he "deliberately confuses painting's ontology"Durden, Mark. "On Painting, Part 2, Peter Kinley and Paul Winstanley," Frieze, October 1994. in order to potentially reconcile it with those mediums.Searle, Adrian. "Paul Winstanley," Time Out London, 3–10 February 1993.Morley, Simon. "Peter Kinley and Paul Winstanley," Art Monthly, June 1994.Clancy, Luke. "Paul Winstanley, Homeland," Modern Painters, June 2005.
Winstanley has exhibited at institutions including the Tate,Herbert, Martin. "Paul Winstanley," Time Out London, 1 December 1998. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MoCA LA),Young, Paul. "The walls can talk, and these artists listened," Los Angeles Times, 20 March 2008. Retrieved 1 August 2022. Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA),Irish Museum of Modern Art. Self as Selves, Exhibitions. 1 August 2022. Royal Academy of Arts (London), Esbjerg Kunstmuseum (Denmark), Walker Art Center,Riddle, Mason. "Art: 'Lifelike' is more than skin deep," StarTribune, 17 August 2012. Retrieved 28 July 2022. and Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. His work belongs to the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art,Museum of Modern Art. Paul Winstanley, Veiled Lobby, Collection. Retrieved 28 July 2022. British Council,British Council. Paul Winstanley, Collection. Retrieved 28 July 2022. MoCA LA,Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Paul Winstanley, Veiled Lobby, Artist. Retrieved 28 July 2022. IMMA, and Tate,Tate. Paul Winstanley, Artist. Retrieved 28 July 2022. among others.
Education and career Winstanley was born in Manchester, United Kingdom in 1954. He attended Lanchester Polytechnic in 1972–3 before training in fine art at Cardiff College of Art (BA, 1976) and the Slade School of Fine Art (higher degree, 1978).Bucklow, Christopher. "Aspects of Drawing at House," Artscribe, No. 31, 1981. His early paintings and works on paper focused on abstract structural principles and were influenced by American minimalist painters such as Brice Marden and Robert Ryman.
Winstanley appeared in early group shows at Whitechapel Gallery and House Gallery and solo exhibitions at Riverside Studios (1978) and Watermans Arts Centre (1987). After making a significant break into realist imagery based in photography, he received wider recognition in the 1990s through exhibitions at Kettle's Yard, Cambridge (where he was an artist-in-residence in 1992), Camden Arts Centre, Walker Art Gallery and Maureen Paley Interim Art in the United Kingdom, and CRG Gallery in New York, among others.Kent, Sarah. "Camden Arts Centre," Time Out London, 14–21 April 1003.Cotter, Holland. "Paul Winstanley," The New York Times, 5 May 1995, p. C30. Retrieved 1 August 2022. In his later career he has had solo shows at the Tate and Cristea Roberts Gallery in London,Tate. Art Now: Paul Winstanley Annexe. Retrieved 1 August 2022. Mitchell-Innes & Nash (New York), 1301PE (Los Angeles),Knight, Christopher. "Paul Winstanley Conjures a Reflective Expressiveness at 1301PE," Los Angeles Times, 24 May 2014. Retrieved 28 July 2022. Kerlin Gallery (Dublin),Dunne, Aidan. "Facing up to familiar scenes," The Irish Times, 6 April 2005. Galerie Vera Munro (Hamburg),Astoff, Jens. "Paul Winstanley, Altered States," Kunstforum, December 2019. and Galerie Andreas Binder (Munich), among others.Hoffmann, Justin. "Paul Winstanley," Artforum, February 1998. 1 August 2022. In 2008, Artspace in New Zealand mounted a retrospective of his work.Renton, Andrew and Christel Fricke. Paul Winstanley: Threshold, Auckland, NZ: Clouds and Artspace, 2008.Ocula. Paul Winstanley, Artists. Retrieved 28 July 2022.
Work and reception Since the late 1980s Winstanley's art has mainly focused on large, realistically rendered oil paintings that merge modernist aesthetics and postmodern investigation with two classical genres, the interior and the landscape. His work balances interests in processes of observation and depiction, the role of the viewer, and the psychology of quotidian, post-war communal spaces.Asthoff, Jens. "Paul Winstanley," Artforum, March 2004. 1 August 2022. Critics have described his style as an "indistinct naturalism"Street, Ben. "59 Paintings; In which the artist considers the process of thinking about and making work," Times Literary Supplement, 27 September 2018. combining painterly softness and invisible technique, a meticulous dispassionate recording of observation and photographic detail (including flaws such as lens flare and the hazing of contours), and the subjective alteration of composition, light and color from source materials. His approach both points to its basis in photography and asserts independence from it, complicating the work's apparent claims to representation.Nolan, Mary Catherine. "Paul Winstanley 'Faith After Saenredam and Other Paintings," Artists News Sheet, September/October 2017. Retrieved 1 August 2022. ARTnews critic Barbara Pollack wrote that Winstanley's approach to landscape was "never entirely natural," but rather, "mediated by human presence, first when he picks up a camera and then brush and later when we, the audience, observe these scenes as invited intruders."
Winstanley's interiors center on archetypal, interchangeable, transitional spaces in which time passes slowly: institutional lounges and lobbies, waiting rooms, empty studios, corridors and walkways (e.g., T.V. Room, 1991; Lounge A, 1997); a 1998 Artforum review deemed them "mental images in a double sense": remembrances of things seen and depictions of potential, deferred interactions or situations. Writers have characterized the images, variously, as austere, contemplative, filled with ennui, and eerie, often relating their deserted melancholy to the Northern European painting tradition of artists such as Vermeer, Caspar David Friedrich and Vilhelm Hammershøi, or to Edward Hopper. Time Out critic Matthew Breen wrote that Winstanley's handling of cold light and geometric composition brings "a kind of romanticism to the most anonymous of spaces." His images often feature windows as a motif: screens partially obscured by translucent curtains, blinds, fog or mist that function like thresholds into surreal, uncanny parallel worlds, points of interpenetration between interior and exterior realities, or frames-within-frames recalling the Renaissance notion of paintings as windows (e.g., Nostalgia 2, 1999; Utopia 1, 2005).
Critics have noted how Winstanley employs certain methods—blurred imagery and repeated but subtly altered scenes that suggest the receding quality of memory and passing time—to introduce affect and temporality into his work and invite reflection.Reardon, Valerie. "Postcards on Photography," Art Monthly, February 1999. The quality of folding time and space is furthered by the scenes Winstanley chooses to portray: spaces of waiting or transition, whose vernacular, post-war utopian aesthetic has since been called into question, yet may inspire wistfulness. His paintings Lounge (Night) and Lounge A (1997) depict the Friedrich painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818)—an image of the back of a figure gazing into a foggy mountain landscape—wedged on a wall between windows in a lounge with seven vacant seats.Morley, Simon. "The Friedrich Factor," Contemporary Visual Arts, Issue 19, 1998. Critics such as Simon Morley suggested that the paintings' changing luminosity, setting (a place to kill time), laborious photo-realist technique, and emphasis on viewing pointed to the "call of the transcendent, the potential of a liminal expanse of 'stretched time'" through which to contemplate "the spirituality of the aesthetic."
Winstanley began producing his "Veil" series in the late 1990s: diaphanous, translucent paintings of mainly vacant interiors focused on light streaming in through or blocked by wall-to-wall and sheer curtains, blinds and large plate-glass windows, which sometimes framed outdoor conditions such as mist.McLaren, Duncan. "Blinded by the Light: Paul Winstanley," The Independent, 10 December 2000. Critics described them as haunting, sometimes unsettling works that emphasised the transience of the interior-exterior relationship, either mediating views of landscape and bright outdoor light (Hub, 2000) or closing them off in ways suggesting the isolation of a cloister or cell (Viewing Room, 1997; Veil 20, 2007). In other images, Winstanley set generic built enclosures against the pastoral (for example, birch trees in idyllic rural settings or untamed brush), invoking a sense of the intrusion of one realm onto the other (e.g., Walter Gropius' Balcony, 2002; his 2005 exhibition, "Homeland", Kerlin Gallery).
In the early 2000s, Winstanley's paintings began to include occasional, solitary figures immersed in their own worlds.Fielding, Anne. "Paul Winstanley," Time Out London, September 2003. Standing in front of windows, slumped in front of televisions, or looking out of the picture, they generally faced away from the viewer, introducing a sense of voyeurism into the work. This figurative emphasis came to the fore in a 2011 exhibition at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, which included images such as Enclosure—a man in a gray suit sneaking a cigarette in the greenery abutting a boxy modern office building—or Jesus is Coming, which portrayed two men at the top of a park stairway gazing out of frame.
"Art School" project