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Neal Tait (British, 1965)
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Neal Tait
Country Booby 2008
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Neal Tait
Deluge 2008
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Neal Tait
Untitled 2008
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Neal Tait
Untitled 2008
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Neal Tait
Untitled 2008
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Biography |
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1965 |
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Born in Edinburgh, Neal Tait studied at Chelsea School of Art and then the Royal College of Art, where he graduated in 1993. |
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1987 - 1991 |
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Chelsea School of Art , London (BA ) |
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1991 - 1993 |
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Royal College of Art, London (MA) |
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1993 |
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Henderson & Parkinson Travel Award |
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2001 |
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Residency British School at Rome |
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For his exhibition at White Cube in February 2000 he presented a series of paintings of individual heads. Each painting depicted a character that appeared sealed in and self-contained. The most distinctive element in these pictures is that the character’s eyes are always averted, making the people seem unavailable, refusing the gaze of the viewer. As well as this, their features are variously reduced, schematised, bleached out or latent beneath mask-like layers of translucent paint. Tait often works from various types of source material – an image in a magazine, a sketch from the imagination, or as is most often the case, a photograph. He often re-works paintings over a length of time, adding and subtracting elements according to the internal dynamic of the painting, which is sometimes bold and at other times obscure. In the past, Tait has explored a series of given, irreducible structures such as a group of suburban houses, simplified to their most basic elements – four walls, a window and a roof. Tait also makes gouaches that present corners of the everyday world, the clutter of a living room, a scout’s hut in a playing field, a birdhouse, an old television set, the overlooked things on the periphery of our vision. |
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Tait’s pictures demonstrate his concern with painting as an exploratory process, whereby meaning can be suggested through the handling of paint itself. In his recent paintings, large areas of canvas remain blank creating the feeling of open-ended, expanded works which seem to suggest many different narratives; transparent washes and thin skeins of paint describing simple, informal structures. There is a distillation at work, where a thought process has been reduced to an ineffable subject, darkly emotional and suggestive of a burgeoning psychological drama. Often displaying an extreme version of figuration using a flat and reduced palette, they push the limits of representation. |
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Tait has exhibited at various venues internationally. Solo exhibitions include White Cube, London (1999 and 2002), Sies + Höke Galerie, Düsseldorf (2002 and 2004), Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2002) and Monica da Cardenas, Milan (2004). In 2000 Tait was awarded the British School at Rome Fellowship. |
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Lives in London |
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Exhibitions |
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2008 |
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Paintings, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York |
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2008 |
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Works on paper, ACME., Los Angeles |
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2008 |
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Sies + Höke Galerie, Düsseldorf (solo) |
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2007 |
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„Very abstract and hyper figurative“, Section III, Department of Pigments on Surface, Museum of Modern Art and Western Antiquities, London |
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2007 |
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'Tambalamb', ACME., Los Angeles (solo) |
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2006 |
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'Now is the discount of our winter tents', White Cube, London (solo) |
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2006 |
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'Dark Mutter', Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens |
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2006 |
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'About Painting' Paraplufabriek, Nijmegen |
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2006 |
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'John Baldessari / Neal Tait', Museum Dhondt-Daenens, Deurle, Belgium |
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2005 |
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'Hoch hinaus', Kunstmuseum Thun, Schweiz |
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2005 |
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Summer Exhibition 2005, Royal Academy, London |
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2005 |
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'If not that then this', Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf |
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2004 |
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'Der gute Schmerz', Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf (solo) |
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2004 |
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Galleria Monica De Cardenas, Mailand |
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2004 |
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'Eclipse',White Cube, London (u.a. mit Mona Hartoum, Sergej Jensen, Darren Almond, Cerith Wyn Evans, Isa Genzken) |
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2004 |
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'She’s come unedone',Artemis Greenberg van Doren, New York |
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2004 |
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Direct Painting, Kunsthalle Mannheim, Mannheim |
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2004 |
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Neal Tait, Galleria Monica De Cardenas, Milan (solo) |
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2003 |
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The Burnished Ramp, White Cube, London (solo) |
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2003 |
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Dirty Pictures, The Approach, London (group) |
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2003 |
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'The Burnished Ramp', White Cube, London |
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2003 |
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Dirty pictures, The Approach, London |
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2002 |
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'Paintings on the move', Kunsthalle Basel |
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2002 |
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The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (solo) |
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2002 |
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Sies + Höke Galerie, Düsseldorf (solo) |
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2002 |
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In the Freud Museum, Freud Museum, London (group)
Painting on the Move, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel (group) |
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2002 |
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Neal Tait, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (solo)
Neal Tait, Sies + Höke Galerie, Düsseldorf (solo) |
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2001 |
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Abbild. Recent Portraiture and depiction, Steirisc[:her:]bst, Landesmuseum, Graz (group) |
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2000 |
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Drawings, Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel-Aviv (group)
Salon, Delfina Project Space, London (group)
Hellseher, Konkordiastr, Dusseldorf (group)
no.site.specific, Mellow birds, Underwood Street, London (group)
Cheated, A22 Projects, Laystall Street, London (group) |
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2000 |
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Painting, White Cube, London (solo) |
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2000 |
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'Painting', White Cube, London (solo) |
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1999 |
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'Limit-less', Krinzinger Gallery, Wien |
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1999 |
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Limit-less, Krinzinger Gallery, Vienna (group) |
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1998 |
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Rising Scum, Fab-Co Warehouse, Brixton, London (group) |
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1997 |
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Election Night, Poster Gallery, London (collaboration) (group) |
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1996 |
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Untitled, Mallow Street, London (group) |
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1995 |
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Unplugged, Peckham Road, London (group) |
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1994 |
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Miniatures, The Agency, London (group) |
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1993 |
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Whitworths Young Contemporaries, Manchester Riverside Open, Riverside Studios, London (group)
XIXI, Henry Moore Gallery, Royal College of Art, London (group) |
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1993 |
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Cottage, Union Street, London (solo) |
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1993 |
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'XIXI'; Henry Moore Gallery, Royal College of Art, London |
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1991 |
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Germinations, Lugwig Forum, Aachen, Germany; Budapest, Hungary (group) |
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1990 |
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Arteries, Huntington Gallery, Boston (group)
Riverside Open, Riverside Studios, London (group) |
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1989 |
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Whitworths Young Contemporaries, Manchester (group) |
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1988 |
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Spirit of London, South Bank Centre, London (group) |
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