Ideas and Aperitifs with Mick Finch
Ideas and Aperitifs is a regular salon for UAL fine art staff and friends, chaired by ICFAR’s Director, Claire MacDonald, and hosted in the convivial surroundings of the Art Workers’ Guild, 6, Queens Square WC1N 3AT.
Mick Finch writes and paints - and the two practices inform one another. He has published regularly since 1994, mainly for Contemporary magazine and has guest edited an edition of the Journal of Visual Art Practice on artist’s writing to be published in June 2009. A book on his working process, in the ‘How Art Thinks’ series, will be co-published in 2010 by ICFAR, London and IFCAR, ZHdK, Zurich. For Ideas and Aperitifs he will talk about new work in the space between print publication, the plane of painting and the discursive practices of writing.
Since his Closer Than You Think series of paintings in 1996 his work has been concerned with the place of image in painting. In the Sublimey series of 2004 what in the beginning was a rhetorical preoccupation with abstraction has been applied to a wider historical and cultural context as 19th rather than 20th century hegemonic formations. Whereas Closer Than You Think related to a U.S./European post-war relationship to painting, Sublimey focused on rhetorical structures that have their roots in a European context. His most recent work is in the form of two series; Taken As Read and Bare Life. Taken As Read is series of paintings, an internet published book, and a series of A2 inkjet prints. The concern here is with the economy of the image between its presence on the internet, its transformation in Photoshop, culminating in its transcription as hard copy and paintings. The book plays out this passage and transcriptive moment. The prints organise the shapes and matter of the studio archive in terms of a spatialization that exploits the fine detail printing of high resolution, high end ink jet printing. What seems like a dot within a constellation of matter is, on inspection, a discreet shape and image. Bare Life is a series of wooden relief works where shape, literal depth and a diversity of surfaces are operative and where the preoccupations of Taken As Read are further played out through painterly and pictorial strategies.
Mick Finch studied at Ravensbourne College of art (1976-80) and the Royal College of Art (1982-85). He exhibits internationally, most recently in a solo exhibition at Galerie Aubert, Paris and a forthcoming exhibition in 2010, with Guillaume Paris, at the Galerie Thermale in Nancy, France. As a teacher he has worked at Parsons School of Design, was the head of Painting at Kent Institute of Art and Design and between 2000 - 2007 was the professeur de l'atelier de peinture at the Ecole des Beaux-arts de Valenciennes, France. Since January 2008 he has been the 2D Pathway leader of the Fine Art course at Central Saint Martins. In 2003 he received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and in 2005 he was a Senior Scholar at the Terra Foundation, France.
See www.mickfinch.com for further information.
