NEAL TAIT

February 12 - March 27, 2004

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Press Release

NEAL TAIT12 February - 27 March 2004 We are pleased to announce the first exhibition in Italy of the British artist Neal Tait. Born in Edinburgh in 1965, Tait graduated at the Royal College of Art and lives in London. Since 2000 he is represented by White Cube Gallery in London. In 2002 he took part in the in the exhibition Painting on the Move at Kunsthalle Basel and had solo shows at Galerie Sies+Höke in Düsseldorf and at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin. Tait is a painter whose subjects are always contingent and this exhibition brings together a series of new works that demonstrate his concerns with painting as an exploratory process, whereby meaning can be suggested through the handling of paint itself. In these paintings large areas of canvas remain blank, creating the feeling of open-ended, expanded works which seem to suggest many different narratives; transparent washes and thin skeins of paint describing simple, informal structures. These works seem to display an extreme version of figuration, which, through their flat, reduced palette, push the limits of representation. Tait often works from various types of source material - an image in a magazine, a sketch from the imagination, or as is most often the case, a photograph from reportage, fashion, advertising, sport or architecture. He often reworks paintings over a length of time, adding and subtracting elements according to the internal dynamic of the painting. In the past, Tait has explored a series of given, irreducible structures such as a group of suburban houses, simplified to their most basic elements - four walls, a window and a roof. In these new paintings, there is a similar distillation at work, where a thought process has been reduced to an ineffable subject, darkly emotional and suggestive of a burgeoning psychological drama.


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