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Solo Exhibition: In the Country of the Blind, held 2 May to 13 June 2009

This was a solo exhibition held at Galerie Schuster, Berlin, a major international gallery which cultivates networking relationships with major museums and international collections and offers a gallery programme centred on emerging international artists. Shepherd exhibited 17 paintings.

Research Imperatives

The research questions interrogate definitions of romanticism, the nature of the imagination and the visionary in the 21st century. Shepherd’s work is an exploration of the ways that painting can respond to imagination where the authentic and fictional combine and compete.

The research began by exploring examples of English/Northern European visionary art exemplified through Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516), Pieter Breughel the Elder (1525-69) and Arnold Bocklin (1827-1901). Shepherd also read texts that explored the historical imperatives of spiritual and secular space.

In this work, Shepherd aimed to portray a sense of other worldliness that is poetic and dreamlike but fraught with underlying threat. Populated by mysterious characters who reveal themselves whilst cavorting, performing rites of passage or standing firm as if to present the ways of this strange world, magicians, skeletons, figurines, pearly kings, harlequins and unclothed innocents depict a place of folk and ritual. But within these apparent idylls lurks an implied menace. Solitude, stillness, death, madness and the threat of a cruel and bizarre nature also lie here.

Shepherd’s landscapes often begin with actual locations experienced in the artist’s daily life and then fuse with an internalised vision, whilst characters recall family members or romantic heroes of the past. We are shown a liminal place between life and death; madness and sanity; imagination and reality; horror and beauty; trepidation and curiosity; fear and abandonment.

Portfolio

CD:

(i) Images of the exhibition

(ii) Date of dissemination – press release and invitation