untitledartfairs.com/san-francisco
Private View | Thursday January 17, 3pm - 9pm
General Opening Hours | Friday January 18, 12pm - 8pm, Saturday January 19 and Sunday January 20, 12pm - 6pm
Christine Park Gallery is delighted to announce its first participation at Untitled San Francisco 2019. The gallery will present a dedicated solo presentation of UK based painter Nick Archer (b. 1963) and the artist’s canvas, sandpaper and copper series.
With a depth of vision and a scale of multi-layered meanings, Nick Archer’s paintings possess a Lynchian quality that suggests a dystopian vision of a world in crisis, a journey at an end. His paintings link the painting style of the early Northern European artists like Bruegel, Uccello and Bosch to more contemporary cinematographic language of recent dark fairy tales such as del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth and Burton’s Edward Scissorhands, Sleepy Hollow and Alice in Wonderland. Here menace is implicit in a seemingly enchanted landscape. Archer is interested in the balance between beauty and menace and this is enhanced through his use of colour. The use of complimentary colour creates harmony and yet there is a discord. These qualities of the sublime in his painting reflect his central theme: the overwhelming power of nature.
His landscapes focus on a point of interest such as a caravan or abandoned vehicle or a building that has come to the end of a journey. They are in the process of being reclaimed by nature and allude to both a world out of kilter and a more disturbed state of being, reflecting the vulnerability and isolation of the human condition.
For its participation at Untitled San Francisco 2019, the gallery will focus on his paintings made on copper and black sand cloth (silicon carbide). Archer’s innovative use of materials is both aesthetic and conceptual. He enjoys the paint effects achieved on the surfaces, but the industrial nature of these materials creates a tension between something beautiful made on a utilitarian material. The link between the concept of the work and the process of how it is made is key to Archer’s practice.
