Output details

‘Hotel Minerva' was a solo exhibition of 14 paintings exploring specific locations, drawing from postcards of the 1960s and 1970s of Lugano and Monte Carlo, as well as images developed during a residency at Birmingham University, foregrounding a more quotidian image of a British city

This exhibition explores how an individual and expressive painting language can be realised in relation to current ideas about representational painting within contemporary art. In the face of critiques of authorship, the objective was to use images of urban place derived from photographic sources in conjunction with the hand-made painted mark. The work thus explores the relationship between painting and photography, with references to time, documentation and the city. Themes of memory, longing, absence, presence and immanence are embedded, and restore to painting practice the possibility of containing reference and meaning. The combination of images of many different places in this exhibition set up a ‘conversation’ between themselves, of place to place, of typology, and in terms of their treatment through paint and colour. The work ‘Pub 1’, of a public house on Bristol Road in Birmingham, is now in the collection of Soho House, in Hollywood, USA. ‘Hotel Minerva’ was cited in the Edexcel GCE Art and Design AS paper in Spring 2013.

The practice of working on sets of paintings on a particular theme is one of the recurring tropes within art history and this particular exhibition presented a series that constituted a journey, both through place and through time. The aspect of time was realised through the imagery from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, with the colour drawn from the specific printing media used in this period.

‘Hotel Minerva’ engages with representation without irony, in a complex dialogue with the history of painting itself. Brigid McLeer’s catalogue essay for the Birmingham residency, which generated works included in this exhibition, noted the extent to which the focus on a lack of drama is able to catalyse the everyday. Two subsequent solo exhibitions at Cross Gallery, Dublin, included some of these works and developments of the theme.