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‘There Is A Place’, group exhibition, included work by Graham Chorlton, George Shaw, Christiane Baumgartner, Paul Winstanley, Laura Oldfield-Ford, and Barry Thompson. Curator Helen Jones invited the artists to explore the idea of psychic connectivity to landscape through painting, drawing and print. Chorlton’s works in the show were: ‘Gap’, 2011, acrylic on canvas; ‘A Short History of Concrete’, 2008-11, acrylic and oil, 18 canvases, each 10 ins x 8 ins; ‘Pub’, 2009, acrylic on canvas; ‘Apartments’, 2011, acrylic on canvas; ‘Tree With Lights’, 2010, acrylic on canvas; ‘Garage 1’, acrylic on canvas, 2009, ‘House 1’, acrylic and oil on canvas, 2011; ‘Blossom 2’, 2011, acrylic on canvas. The exhibition ran from 20th Jan - 14th April 2012

Chorlton’s work for ‘There is a Place’ comprised eight paintings (one of them multi-part). The work used images of places sourced from personal photographs and a variety of commercially reproduced photography from the 1950s to the 1970s. The work explored the relationship between the painted mark and the image depicted, and in the complexity of that relationship created a sense of time and memory, of presence and absence. Colour, light and composition are used to take the images of everyday places to another psychological realm; historically this connects to painters like Georgio Morandi, and also taps into a seam within contemporary painting practice exemplified by George Shaw and Paul Winstanley (also in the exhibition), and Merlin James, who argues for the discipline of painting being a continuing, important and unique way of containing human experience. The colour used by Chorlton references the specific ranges found in 1950s and 1960s commercial printing.

‘A Short History of Concrete’ comprised 18 small paintings hung in a grid formation, each featuring an image of a single building. The viewer moves around in time and space as their gaze moves between these images, and the colour and paint surface homogenizes the images into a history of all cities and their inhabitants. Some of the paintings reference 1930s and 1960s modernist housing, ‘traditional’ pub architecture, and 1970s petrol station structures. Other paintings have more elusive imagery: ‘Tree With Lights’, ‘Gap’ and ‘Blossom 2’ suggest glimpsed moments in urban settings. All are part of the development of a new expressive visual language within the discipline of painting.

‘A Short History of Concrete’ was purchased by Walsall Art Gallery for their permanent collection. ‘Blossom 2’ was subsequently purchased for the Irish government’s national collection.