Mike Newton | ALPHAVILLE

9 – 27 November 2006
Private View 8 November 6-9pm

Brick Lane Gallery is pleased to present Alphaville, an exhibition of work by British painter Mike Newton. Newton’s evocative scenes stem from drawings, photographs and found objects coming together to create emotive and narrative images often addressing the theme of melancholia.

Almost Seen, Oil on Canvas, 140 x 190cm

View images from the exhibition ...

Almost Seen, 2006 uses traditional methods of oil painting to convey a sombre interior and exterior landscape. Inside a wooden floored room a female figure almost ridiculously conceals herself by standing on her hands, with her skirt fallen over her face, against a pillar while a dog quietly and inquisitively observes her. Through sliding glass doors can be seen a rural outdoors softly drifting into the distance of a lake.

Newton is interested in memory and loss – specifically his own experience of it as a teenager. He likes to recall and reinvent specific half remembered scenes with issues of ennui, ritual, role-play and confusion about identity concurrently playing a part. Using his own drawings, photographs and found objects Newton creates a sketched collage, with oil glazes, directly onto the canvas or wooden panel to initiate an immediate landscape.

Bringing together all these elements his work also dwells on bleak realities of modern society. Candy Man, 2006 is a grey urban backdrop neatly containing three hooded figures. The central figure has his back turned and arms in a position suggesting he is handling an object as the other two, turned to the side, look on with hands guiltily stuffed in their pockets. The grey faces of the two peripheral characters can be glimpsed ominously sheltering in their hoods next to the central figure whose neon pink t-shirt contrastingly protrudes from beneath his similarly grey jacket. The vitally natural proximity or distance, and subtle tilt of objects and characters in his work capture the essence of snapped scenes and memories.

Newton has exhibited extensively in the UK and his work is currently included in Full Spectrum at Sherborne House and at the Jerwood Gallery. Manchester born Newton works and lives in Bath.